


West - Crossing Paths

by shaenie



Series: West [2]
Category: LoTR RPS - AU
Genre: F/M, M/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2010-10-01
Updated: 2010-10-02
Packaged: 2017-10-12 08:40:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 7
Words: 31,632
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/123018
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shaenie/pseuds/shaenie





	1. First Impressions: Cate, Harry, Yuma, 1874

There's talk of her all over town, of course, and not just in the drinking halls, either.

The wives of certain businessmen of Harry's acquaintance are already disposed to hate her, which is enough reason by itself for Harry to feel a certain amount of interest and admiration. "Wives," Harry mutters, and shudders. Abominable creatures really. He never has understood why a man would be stupid enough to saddle himself with one.

Far easier to live with an arrangement like the one Harry has with Deborah, she of the wide, ingenious blue eyes and sweet, soft little body. She's his current favorite, and has been long enough that he's thinking about doing something particular for her. He's not sure what, yet, but it'll come to him. It always does, when the need comes up.

He prides himself on being an imaginative man, and he has a way of knowing what sort of thing will inspire the right amount of loyalty and gratitude.

But even Deborah, to hear tell of it, has nothing on this Cate.

Harry hasn't actually met her to see for himself, but her name is on the lips of every man of means, wife, and whore in Yuma, and while their opinions of the woman vary greatly, there is one thing all of them agree on: Cate Blanchett is a raving beauty.

That's enough to give Harry a reason to meet her, but there are others, as well.

According to some, she's not only handsome, but shrewd.

In only a few short weeks she's set herself up as a "gentleman's companion" of some repute. Part of that can be attributed to the fact that she's the only "gentleman's companion" to be found in Yuma; you can find a whole mess of whores, but that's a horse of a different color. If you listen to the wives of Yuma (which Harry does, on occasion; he doesn't like them, but he's not stupid, and wives know things about their husbands, especially if he loves her, or if she hates him), she's a high-dollar whore; if you listen to Sutherland (who seems to have taken on the role of patron), she's a courtesan.

Either way, some measure of her success has to be attributed to the lady herself.

Harry's left a calling card, but has yet to hear from her. He is more amused than rankled by this.

He appreciates the subtle guile necessary to make a man like him (and others) wait upon the pleasure of a whore, and though he can't be certain until he's met her, he suspects the guile is the woman's, not Sutherland's. Sutherland is a wealthy man, and not unintelligent, but he's notoriously straight-forward.

He appreciates it, but he's growing impatient, which is why he's on his way to John Bailey's house late on a Thursday night.

Bailey hosts a card game every Thursday -- one which Harry sometimes attends -- and Harry is given to understand that this woman, Cate, will be playing hostess to this one. He finds it unusual that she should offer such services as well as the other, more standard sort, but then again, he's never met a "gentleman's companion." Perhaps it's expected.

He'll soon find out.

Cate's alive.

Not in the merest sense of her heart beating and her breath flowing, though at this moment she is hyperaware of her own body. The brush of her hair on the bare back of her neck is almost unbearably acute; the cool sharp edges of the cards razor across her fingertips as she idles the deck in her hands, waiting for the players to call for them.

"Two," Day Lewis says at last, and Cate tugs her flushed lower lip in her teeth and skims the cards to him. He tips them up by the corners only, his dark brows gathered together, then his lean face breaks into a wolf-toothed grin.

"Royal flush," he announces, flipping his entire hand over to much joking outcry from the other players.

Cate laughs, her eyes shining at him as if this victory was a gift given from her hand. She leans forward, her chin deliberately tipped up and to one side to expose the long line of her throat and shoulders and the tops of her breasts as she gathers the scattered cards together again.

"Miss Blanchett," Bailey says, beaming at her, "perhaps you'd take a hand yourself this time?"

Cate shakes her head, setting the little hanging tinsels of her earrings tinkling against the corners of her jaw.

"I'm a dreadful hand at poker, Mister Bailey," she says, her voice deliberately low and vibrant. "And I make it a point never to play a game I don't think I can excel at."

Bailey flushes dark red with delight, and there's a murmur of appreciative amusement around her.

"Miss Blanchett," Sutherland says at her shoulder, and Cate turns her head to see him offering her his open cigarette case.

Cate lets her gaze slide deliberately back to the others.

"Would you gentlemen be very scandalized if I indulged?"

There's a hasty round of 'no's and almost nervous laughter as Cate turns back to Sutherland and selects a cigarette. There's a near flurry of elbowing and bowing as several men hasten to offer her a light.

The sound of the hall bell ringing echoes faintly through the door of the door of the drawing room.

Cate leans back in her chair, holding her cigarette high so that her bracelets slide down on her wrist.

"If you keep this up," Sutherland murmurs in her ear, "and you'll own this town in a month."

"If I keep this up," Cate murmurs back, "I'll pay you back for the clothes in a week."

The door of the drawing room opens softly, and Bailey's manservant bows in the newcomer. Cate leans to set her cigarette down in the ashtray.  
"Mister Harry Sinclair," the servant says.

Cate tosses her head, streaming smoke through her parted lips.

"Harry," Bailey says. "Glad you could stop by. Miss Blanchett, may I present Harry Sinclair?"

Harry takes Bailey's hand and shakes it absently, but he isn't even pretending to pay any attention to his host. He sincerely doubts Bailey will hold it against Harry.

His attention is on Miss Blanchett, and her attention is on him, and for a moment they are regarding each other with the frank and intimate perusal of two business men (so to speak) sizing up the competition. In the three or four seconds this takes, everyone else in the room falls silent. Harry doesn't know if Miss Blanchett is aware of the fact that everyone in the room is blatantly watching them, but he suspects rather strongly that she is.

Something about her eyes...

He likes her already.

He steps forward, murmuring, "A very sincere pleasure, Miss Blanchett," and when she extends her hand -- palm down, fingers curled, very much the gesture of a lady -- he takes it and brushes his lips chastely over her knuckles. When he straightens, she's smiling faintly, and her eyes are coolly speculative.

"The pleasure is mine, Mister Sinclair," she says, and her warm, rich voice is a silky contrast to her cool eyes. Harry finds that it's one he likes.

And yes, he thinks, shrewd is definitely the word for her. She lifts the cigarette and inhales, red lips curling just so, and she knows just how she looks indulging in such a way, with her hair upswept and intricately arranged and her elegant silk dress, every inch a lady except for the illicit cylinder against her lips.

A lady of contrasts; interesting in so many ways.

"Shall we deal you in, Harry?" Sutherland asks, his expression faintly dour, but his tone cordial for all that.

It's much the way Harry and Sutherland deal with one another on any normal day, so it's hard to be sure, but Harry suspects attributing Sutherland's lack of welcome to Cate Blanchett's presence (or rather, Harry's presence in Miss Blanchett's presence, to be precise) would be a safe bet.

"I didn't walk all this way for your company, Donald," Harry says jovially, because he can't quite help jabbing at Sutherland. "Though I might've done, had I known you boys were keeping such fine company this evening." He directs a smile toward Miss Blanchett.

Cate turns her head away, a gesture that might almost be considered coy if it weren't for the smile curling her mouth and the way the movement displays the powerful curve at the side of her neck and the clean angle of her jaw.

Sinclair steps away momentarily, picking up a chair from the corner and bringing it to the table. He comes straight to her side, and there's some shuffling up of the other players to make room for him. Cate notes how the others defer to him without appearing to; the room is quieter now that he's here, the conversation less boisterous and unguarded.

"There's a hundred dollars buy in, and a minimum raise of ten dollars per card drawn," Cate says evenly, running the deck through her hands.

She's practiced this exhaustively, learning some of the less showy cuts and runs to shuffle the cards. She does them quickly enough to evidence mastery, and slowly enough to display the curl of her pale fingers around the deck. Her bracelets tinkle and chime against each other.

"And the house takes ten percent of every pot," she adds, and she lets her gaze slide sideways to his face, her brows arched and her smile sly. "Is that agreeable, Mister Sinclair?"

When he doesn't respond, she turns to look him full in the face. He's smiling – no – grinning at her, as he slides his wallet out.

"I'd say that was more than reasonable," he says, and Cate can sense the tremor of suppressed laughter in his voice.

She looks away again, beginning to flick the cards down around the table with quick precise movements. She's as giddy as if she's been dancing. When the men gather up their cards, Cate turns to watch Sinclair.

He keeps his eyes on his cards, though the arch of his eyebrow tells her he's perfectly aware of her attention.

Cate finds herself biting on her lip, and only partially for effect. Cate knows her weak spots, and Harry Sinclair is probably most of them. He's powerfully built, his well-tailored clothes smoothing but not concealing the weight and width of his body. He's handsome, in a hard-edged weather-worn fashion, with dark hair brindling a little at the temples. He's clearly well used to getting his own way, and he carries himself with the assurance of man who considers himself entitled to the best of everything this town has to offer.

He looks up, meeting Cate's gaze over the cards arrayed in his hand. His eyes – clear amber brown – shine in the lamplight. Cate feels the rush of heat into her cheeks, and ducks her head, laughing. She glances back up in time to see the exchanges of envious but resigned looks among the other players.

She's not going to make this easy for him, though, Cate thinks. She can't afford to indulge herself, not when she's sitting here in a dress she doesn't own, dealing cards to pay her bills at the hotel. Sinclair's going to have come across handsomely before Cate gives him more than the smiles and sly glances he's getting from her now.

She knows her game, Harry sees, observing the flash of pale wrist as she slides a card to Sutherland, then a pair to Bailey. When she deals, she turns her wrist just so, her long, pale fingers soft and lovely, and everything she displays is deliberate.

She knows both of her games, he corrects himself, and smiles faintly.

Harry is close enough to be able to smell her, something simultaneously floral and spicy that he'd wager they don't sell in Yuma, which suits her perfectly. "I'll have one," Harry says when he feels her eyes on him, and he tweaks the three of diamonds from his hand and lays it down on the table, pushing it away.

Her hand curls and slides and her fingers fan out, and Harry takes the card she slides across the table top, his fingertips brushing hers. He doesn't bother to make it look accidental, and she glances at him, head tilted slightly to one side, and gives a slow, liquid smile, her eyes shining beneath the barely concealing flicker of her lashes, before she pulls her hand back.

"Thank you," Harry murmurs with a slight nod, and ignores Sutherland watching him from across the table. Bailey is on the other side of Miss Blanchett -- a right that his money has bought him for the night, Harry understands -- and Harry ponders the unknown (to him, anyhow) propriety of hiring her to hostess an evening like this one.

What is Bailey paying her for, precisely? Is it just this, or does it include whatever comes after, when the rest of the dogs leave the house? Harry wonders if Bailey even knows the answer, and he smiles a little, imagining Bailey sitting there next to the most beautiful woman he's ever met and trying to decide if he's paid her for sex or just to be lovely and charming and deal poker in his drawing room.

It'd be just the sort of thing Bailey would do, too. He's an amiable fella, but at business, he falls short. He doesn't know how to hold on to his money, is his problem, doesn't understand that a man should only spend what he can afford to lose, and even then, only when he stands to at least double what he's laying out. Within the next two years, Harry will own everything Bailey currently holds (including this house, which Harry rather admires), most particularly the Continental, the only hotel in Yuma that rivals Harry's Royale.

Which reminds him...

"So, Miss Blanchett, I hear you've set yourself up at the Archer House." He glances at her, expression bland, and she nods, eyes bright enough that he suspects she's already aware that he owns the Royale.

"You're wasting your breath, Harry," Bailey observes, rearranging his cards in his hand. "I've already offered Miss Blanchett a suite at the Continental; she's having none of it. Claims to be quite comfortable at Archer House."

Harry snorts. "I'm sure you did, Bailey," and Harry is. Bailey likely offered her accommodations free of charge, and Miss Blanchett almost certainly turned them down for that very reason. A woman like her is far too smart to put herself so obviously in a particular man's keeping. "Even so, Miss Blanchett, should the need arise, I'd be honored to have you at the Royale. I'd offer you a reasonable rate, though this time of year you'll understand if I can't discount it too greatly. It's warm enough for travelin' and we get more folk through Yuma than you'd think." He smiles at her, and gives a half shrug. Then, as if it's an afterthought (it's not, of course; if she's staying at Archer House, it's because she's strapped for ready cash, though her clothes and jewelry speak of money), "I'd stand you credit enough on room rent to get you on your feet, if need be," and he's careful to make it sound like he doubts it would be necessary.

"I appreciate the offer, Mister Sinclair," she says, "and I'll certainly take it under consideration."

Harry nods, satisfied (he didn't expect her to accept now; she could hardly reject Bailey's offer and then accept Harry's, especially not in Bailey's house, playing her role as hostess for Bailey's benefit), and slides enough chips into the center of the table to make Day Lewis twitch. "Now then, boys," he says, quirking a brow. "Let's see what you're holding."

They play through several more hands, the conversation ebbing and following, Cate dealing and smiling while her thoughts are elsewhere.

She's under no obligation to stay once the game breaks up. Sutherland brokered a deal for her to act as hostess for Bailey, nothing more.

There's a name for men who arrange that other sort of thing, he'd smirked at her. And I don't care to be called by it.

Cate's shuffling and arranging and evaluating her options with as much interest as any of the players are expending on their cards.

On the one hand, she needs cash, the sooner the better. Sutherland's been remarkably kind – or at least, he's smilingly provided everything Cate needs to get by, and set a reasonable rate of interest on the value of every gown and shoe and hairpin. The fact that he treats her as a delightful and potentially profitable business venture makes her warm to him in a way she never would if he offered these things as outright gifts. She suspects he knows that, too.

By the criteria of profitability, any man in the room would do well enough, with Sinclair, Bailey, and Sutherland being the richest, in descending order.

But Cate's loathe to saddle herself with any association she may have difficulty extracting herself from when things settle down a little and she better understands the potential of this new town. Sinclair does not strike her as the kind of man who can be easily shaken off; Sutherland is too valuable to Cate as an ally for her to waste him as a customer. Bailey, however, watches her with the eager diffidence of a dog hoping for an undeserved treat. Cate throws him a look from under her eyelashes, her gaze heavy and heated, and he flushes up at once and smiles back at her.

There's also the matter of not wanting to scatter her charms too freely on the open market just yet. A courtesan differs from a prostitute in that a prostitute is available to any man who can afford her price; a courtesan must be wooed, and won, and only a very select number of those who can afford her can ever actually attain her. Cate knows that a man like Sinclair will place an even higher value on her if she hasn't been with every other man in his circle.

Day Lewis has a fanatically jealous wife, and Cate's had him twice already; he'll be discreet because he can't afford not be. There have been a few others, mostly travelers whose names and fortunes were known to Sutherland by repute at least. But Cate's too strapped for money to put off local customers for much longer.

Bailey then; for all his money and social standing, he's one of the lesser dogs here. Sinclair won't consider it worth his while to resent Bailey for having Cate first.

The game breaks up a little after ten, when Bailey's servant brings in a small array of supper dishes. There's champagne, which is clearly for Cate's personal benefit, since the men are all drinking spirits.

Harry doesn't miss the glances exchanged between Miss Blanchett and Bailey, but he can afford to be charitable as far as that's concerned.

Harry doesn't expect to take her home tonight, anyhow.

The fact that she not only keeps up with the banter around the table for half a dozen hands (something none of the women of Harry's acquaintance would be able to equal), but actually takes the lead a few times, all the while appearing to play the supporting role, giving whatever man who's talking her entire attention, setting them all up with the opportunity to make her laugh with her subtle proficiency.

That in itself tells Harry something.

Bailey will eventually bore her. No matter what happens tonight after the rest of the gentlemen leave; in the end, she is out of Bailey's league. He won't be able to keep hold of a woman that's smarter than he is -- Harry doesn't know if there's a man alive who could -- and in the end, Miss Blanchett (Cate, he thinks, and muses for a moment on whether her name is Catherine, and if she'd let him call her that in bed) will roll over him like a sandstorm, take him for what he's willing to give (and a little more, Harry would wager), and move on to greener pastures.

And Harry's the only one in this room with greener pastures.

He smiles at the lady, observing her flushed cheeks and her smiling mouth and her long, elegant fingers around the stem of her champagne flute, and gives a nod and a raised glass to Bailey, congratulations and admiration that makes the man flush acutely in pleasure, and he's content to wait.


	2. Parting Ways: Billy/Lando, Helena, Texas, August 1874

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=west_graphic_perfect_stranger_copy.jpg)

 

Lando grins against the side of Billy's face as the two of them stagger up the stairs toward their rented room. Lando is staggering from maybe one too many whiskeys. Billy is staggering because he's supporting most of Lando's weight. Lando leans into him a little harder, and laughs when Billy staggers to one side, bouncing them both off of a wall. He's muttering under his breath, probably curses and things like 'more trouble than you're worth', which he tells Lando all the time, but never means.

And Bills is smiling, anyhow, so it doesn't really matter.

And he should be, they should both be smiling, because they have comported themselves famously (Billy's exact words) at the tables tonight. Lando has more money, heavy and folded thickly in his front pocket, than he has ever before possessed in his life. When Bills had folded it into his hand, he hadn't been able to keep from staring. Then Billy had smirked at him, and Lando had tucked it away with a grin and a slight flush.

But that was hours ago, and now Billy is hauling him toward the door to their room at the hostel, and it occurs to Lando that he has no idea where the key to said room might be. Had he had it in his safe keeping at some point? He sincerely hopes not.

"The key, Bills?" he asks, and then realizes that isn't terribly specific. "Do you have the key, I mean?"

Billy shifts just enough to spear Lando with a mock-disdainful look. He does have the key; he'd taken it off Lando earlier in the night, at about the same time he'd realized he'd probably be carrying him back to the room. When he'd asked for it, Lando'd pulled his injured-innocent face, the one that claimed it wounded him that Billy thought he'd be so irresponsible. It takes no effort whatsoever to retrieve the smirk he'd responded with.

He digs in his pocket. The metal is warm beneath his fingers and he draws it out, only to find Lando has slid out from the circle of his arm and propped himself languidly on the door, hip wedged firmly in front of the lock. Lando's eyes are half-lidded, soft and satisfied and happy. The expression's part cat-that-ate-the-cream, part proud toddler, part alcohol, and in Billy's estimation, all of it's deserved.

That does not change the fact, however, that Lando has managed to mentally vacate the premises while completely blocking the door.

"Get out of my way, Lando," he says, and gets a rather vacant blink in response. Billy sighs and puts a little more force into it. "Lando, move."

He has fallen into a sort of half-doze leaning against the door and only comes back to himself at Billy's voice, his tone bordering on fierce. He grins and shifts away from the door, only to sort of half-tip forward against Billy, winding his lanky frame around Billy's more compact body. He only does this while drunk; his Bills isn't the sort of bloke that encourages a lot of physical contact, but Lando has discovered that he'll suffer it without comment if he thinks Lando is pissed. Not that he isn't pissed; he's just not so pissed that he doesn't know what's going on.

"I have two-hundred-thirty dollars in my pocket," Lando muses aloud as he watches Billy unlock the door. "Two hundred and thirty." He enunciates every word very clearly. They feel like magic words, almost. The amount of money is staggering. He knows it's not much. Not really. But it's more than he's ever had, and it's his, won himself with his own wit and skill, doing nothing more than sitting around a table with five other men and sizing them up, reading them, understanding them. It wasn't so hard.

William Boyd is a very good teacher. One of the best around.

If Lando didn't know it before (he had), he knew it now. The faces of the other men at the table had been dismayed -- almost a little panicked -- when Billy had introduced himself. They had calmed only when he had informed them that he wasn't playing. That Lando was taking the empty seat at the table. They grinned like mad dogs, then, and Bills just gave Lando that Bills-smirk. The 'Go on then, show them what you've got' smirk.

And Lando had. He had. And he has the money in his pocket now, to prove it.

"Bills... " he says, and then trails off because Billy isn't standing there anymore. At some point, he had disengaged Lando's limbs from around his body (Lando isn't sure how he managed this without him noticing, but he is impressed, nonetheless), and is now inside the room, smirking at Lando in the hall and unwinding his gunbelts from around narrow hips. Lando steps inside and closes the door. Only the moonlight from outside and a single candle, burned almost to nothing, illuminate the room. Shadows play on Billy's face, subtle and secret, and Lando wonders what he's thinking that's making his face look like that, gentle and relaxed.

"I won," he says softly, and waits to see what Bills will say, whether he'll be funny or irritable or approving or ... something.

Billy smiles, a slow smile, and he thinks he can feel every stage of it, twisting his face. He doesn't smile very often, and he lets his smiles break surface even less. Lando tells him he should smile more, but they both know how likely that is. Billy's never been one for public displays of any kind, and most people's public smiles are the same as rolling over, or hiding the knife. So he only smiles in private -- like now -- and really he only smiles at Lando, because he has no one else to smile for.

"I was there," he says, finally pulling his gunbelts away from his hips and turning to kneel by his bags. But because he knows Lando is happy -- happier than maybe he's ever been -- Billy adds, "You did well."

Of course Lando did well. Billy knew the first time he saw him touch a deck that he would be a natural, he would be a winner, and he doesn't know why Lando is so surprised. Billy's told him over and over again that when the time comes, he'll have no problems, as long as he sticks to his plan, remembers what Billy's taught him, doesn't let success make him cocky.

When the time comes. And these days, Billy can feel it coming, prickling along his skin whenever Lando takes a place at a table. In terms of the game, there are few things left to hold them together. At this point, risk and experience will be the best teachers Lando can have. There are no true partners in poker, not when it comes to High Stakes; if competition and jealousy don't split you at the table, the inevitable accusations of cheating will drive you from it. And Billy'll be damned if he blocks Lando's potential, but neither can he bow out of his chosen profession.

With effort, Billy pulls himself out of the swirl of his thoughts. Lando, still grinning, cocks his head in puzzled inquiry, but Billy can't bring himself to find all the words this dilemma will take. So he just says, with as much approval as he can muster, "You won't need me for long, the way you're turning out. There's not much left for me to do."

Lando doesn't laugh, though the comment is ridiculous. Of course he'll need Bills. He'll always need Bills.

After nearly two years, he can't imagine how Billy could not know that.

"Bills," he says, and then isn't sure what he intended to say to fill the silence that follows. Billy looks at him, questioning, still smiling a little, which makes Lando smile, too. It's a natural reaction, one he'd stopped fighting a long time ago. When he doesn't say anything else, Billy just stands, strips off his coat, and begins methodically emptying his pockets.

Lando strips off his own gunbelt (only one gun, not two; there's no need for two, his left hand is stupid and untrustworthy when it comes to guns, or to anything else that requires it to act singularly, rather than in concert with his smart hand) and curls the thick leather of it onto the only chair in the room. He watches Billy strip down, nothing he hasn't seen a hundred times before on the trail or in shared hostel rooms like this one. Nothing he hasn't watched before, either.

At first he'd barely noticed, but he notices now, every time, and he tries to conceal it from Billy. He isn't sure why. It just seems the thing to do.

But he's drunk tonight, and high on victory, and Billy is still smiling as he lays his trousers neatly over the back of the same chair Lando's gunbelt is laying on; as Billy brushes by him, Lando's hand snakes out and his fingertips trail over the fine skin of Billy's upper back.

Billy goes still, and Lando isn't sure what that means exactly, but he's just drunk enough, just happy enough, to hope, so he takes it as an encouraging sign.

"Bills," he says again, and raises both hands this time, and slides them across Billy's naked back, across sharply defined shoulder blades to curve up over his shoulders. Billy has scars on his back, old ones that Lando has seen before (and never never would've dreamed of asking about), but he's never felt the lines of them against his hands before, has never felt how they interrupt the otherwise smooth expanse of skin. He doesn't say anything because he's never done this, not with a man, and he doesn't know what to say, doesn't know how to ask.

He wants to see Billy's face. He isn't afraid, exactly -- though there are heated flutters in the lowest depths of his belly -- but he'd know better what his chances were if he could see Billy's eyes.

Lando knows Billy likes men. They've been together a long time, and Lando isn't stupid; the two of them live in very close contact. Billy is discreet, but it would be impossible for them to be partners for this long without at least one damning incident, and there had been one. It is large in Lando's memory, though he guesses that Billy has forgot all about it. But maybe not…

Maybe…

He wants to see want in Billy's face, more, maybe, than he's ever wanted anything else. More than he had wanted to escape his step-father's house, more than he had ever wanted to see a smile on Billy's lips and respect in his eyes, far and away more than he's ever wanted to win a hand of poker.

Everything inside Billy has gone unnaturally still, as though heart and lungs and blood are all waiting for something. The cue to resume function, or disintegrate, or to wind his body backwards. Lando's hands hover light and hot on his shoulders; he can feel them trembling slightly. The nickname hangs in his ears: Bills, in a voice he's never heard Lando use before.

The silence shivers, dense and sparking and growing heavier by the second. He can hear Lando shift slightly behind him, feel his fingers twitch (even now, Lando can't stand still after he's been drinking, especially not when he's nervous). He keeps himself in check, muscles neither tensed nor relaxed, heart rate unchanging. Body as quiet as stone. He has practice with this; it's what makes him so successful, this ability to silence all his reactions, all his nervous tics, and simply be still, unmoving and expressionless.

Bills. Lando.

Lando.

While his mind keeps racing.

He clenches his teeth.

It would be easy to turn around and catch Lando's wrists in his hands, easy to pull his head down and press their mouths together. Easy to take what Lando's offering, to claim him as his own.

It would be easy to accept this.

But easy has never been the name of the game that Billy plays. Easy gets you humiliated, or broke, or killed. If easy doesn't take you down, it takes someone else down in your place, and never really sees the debt as settled.

It doesn't really matter if he wants this (and he can barely look the question in the face, let alone reach to find an answer). What matters is that he can't have it. He shouldn't have it.

Billy closes his eyes and steps out from under Lando's hands.

"You're drunk, Lando," he says calmly. Because that's an explanation for it, a good one. Maybe even good enough to blur this out of the night by the next morning.

"I'm not that drunk," Lando says, and his voice shakes a little, and he hates it. He doesn't know what to do with his hands now that Billy has moved out from under them, so he fists them and lowers them to his sides.

Billy doesn't respond, just stands there, oh so still.

He is drunk, but not so drunk that he doesn't know what he's doing, what he's wanting. What he's wanted for a while now.

One night in Mexico City, Lando had stumbled in just before midnight and caught Bill en flagrante with a pretty young stage actor. The actor had smirked and ducked his head under the sheets, but Bills had just looked at Lando, brows raised in question.

Lando knew how to read the message there, had learned to do it over days and nights and innumerable hours facing Bills over a deck of cards, and he was getting damned good at it.

'Have you done something that makes an immediate departure vital?' that expression asked, but it was laced with amusement.

Lando had given Bill an 'everything's fine' grin in response, along with a little wave (never mind the blush, which he hadn't known how to repress at that point), and backed quickly out of the room.

Lando had gone and found himself a whore, after that. A woman.

But he has known pretty much since then what he wants.

And if he could just see Billy's face he'd know what Billy wants, too. Billy is too still, too utterly still (and Lando had only seen him that still once before, outside Laredo, right before a man had drawn down on him over a slight misunderstanding during a game of cards, but his mind shies away from that now, he doesn't want to associate this stillness with that stillness, which had ended in blood and death and the smell of burned flesh and gunpowder) for Lando to be able to read his body language.

Lando is either brave as hell or the foolhardiest soul in existence. Billy says that to him sometimes. Often. He isn't sure which of the two is more accurate as he sidesteps around Billy and turns to face him.

"I'm not a kid, Bills. I know what I'm doing."

As a response, it's both utterly predictable and right on the mark, but it has what Billy supposes is the desired effect, as he turns his head and steadily meets Lando's gaze.

Lando's hands are fisted at his sides and Billy wants, briefly, to reach out and uncurl his fingers. He has taught him not to show his anger, not to show it when he's upset or disappointed or enraged. He has taught him not to show anything at all, and Lando learned well, but never well enough. Lando, Billy thinks, will never be able to control his emotions entirely, to mask them even when the thunder crashes inside him and threatens to tear him apart.

(A small, treacherous corner of his mind wonders if it's only around Billy that Lando can't control his emotions, and if he truly considers it a failing. He knots the question down tight before he can be tempted to look for an answer.)

Something about the way Lando is standing -- the set of the shoulders, the curl of the lip, so fierce and so unsure at the same time -- reminds Billy of the day they first met, on Lando's stepfather's ranch. Billy had walked in on Lando and his stepfather, arguing; he had walked in and seen Lando there, sullen and fiery, still not quite grown into the long, smooth angles of his body, still not quite comfortable in his work-roughened skin. All potential searching for a direction, any direction but the only one he'd been given.

Watching him then, he'd remembered the choices he'd made at Lando's age, the risks he'd taken and where they'd led him. When he found Lando later, angry and dehydrated on the side of the road, he'd remembered his brother Jack, and the places he'd gone after Jack was taken from him.

Now, looking at him in this silent room, he thinks of all the mistakes he's made that Lando hasn't. The mistakes Lando may never have to make, if only he doesn't lose that perfect equilibrium between shrewdness and innocence that Billy has so carefully tended. He cannot bring himself to compromise that now. And besides, Lando is his partner and student. He can't -- and won't -- violate that relationship. What is between them, however friendly, must remain business, and Billy knows from experience that business doesn't -- can't -- mix with pleasure.

Lando is still waiting for him.

Billy looks down and studies the floor for a moment. It's a concession of sorts, a subtle admission that this ... decision is not nothing. He should say no. He has to say no. But Lando isn't one to take no for an answer. He will ask why, and Billy can't explain why, not really; he can't explain that Lando is off-limits, that Lando, for so many reasons, is untouchable.

On a dark, subterranean level, Billy quietly acknowledges how badly this will go.

He lifts his eyes and says, softly, hoping it will be enough, "Go to bed, Lando."

Lando bristles -- he can't help it -- and narrows eyes on Billy's face. He doesn't like that tone, doesn't like it directed at him, especially now, especially in the midst of this... whatever this is. This possibility.

He is almost sure that Billy wants him. Physically, anyhow. He can't really miss it, in fact, since Billy is standing there in his drawers.

So what the hell?

"I am not a child," he says, and his voice does not shake this time, it is low and deep and utterly serious. "Don't tell me what to do."

It is the only thing he can think of that might make Billy hesitate like this, might make him use that tone. Patronizing (Go to bed, Lando) and a little impatient. Billy has never treated him as anything but an equal (at least, since that first time with the cards, when he had asked Bills to teach him). Even when Lando had not been his equal, even before they had found some common ground on which to associate, even then Billy hadn't treated him like a child, and now this?

He tamps down anger (hurt) deliberately, pushes it back to where it doesn't infringe so much on his thinking, on his ability to judge.

Bills is glittery eyed and tense, and he knows Billy can see that he is angry. If anything, he can see how Lando feels far more clearly than he can see how Billy feels. Billy is better at this, more experienced in every way, and there is nothing Lando can do about that.

"Don't tell me what to do," he repeats, and leans forward, closes the distance quickly, before Billy can pull away, if he means to (Lando has always been just a hair faster than Bills, just a shade more dexterous, although that doesn't seem to apply to the handling of a pistol, in which Billy is faster than anyone Lando has ever seen), and kisses him, soft -- because he isn't sure how to do it hard, isn't really sure how men are supposed to kiss other men -- and careful, and Billy's lips are supple and perfect and warm.

Soft. Lando's lips are unbelievably soft, and feverish, and smooth against Billy's own.

His eyes flutter shut of their own accord. He doesn't remember the last time he was kissed like this, hesitant and tender and hopeful. In his experience, these things have nothing to do with sex. But in the midst of this kiss, it seems impossible that it could be any other way. Beneath the layers left by his stepfather's abuse and Billy's training, Lando has yet to unlearn the hope that fuels his courage. Of course he would bring it into everything he does.

Billy can feel Lando's mouth sliding open (an invitation, a question, a request), and before he can stop himself, before he really knows what he's doing, his lips give under the pressure of Lando's mouth, and he is tasting Lando, he is breathing in Lando's air, he is close enough to feel Lando's heart thudding against his ribcage, and his hands are moving upwards to wrap themselves in Lando's hair.

\--no--

\--no--

\--no.

He can't do this, not with Lando. Not when Lando has so little knowledge of how this could twist their partnership like a knot, of what this could mean. Lando's eyes are open, his hands are clean, and Billy will not see them sullied. He will not allow himself to taint that.

He stops his reaching hands, changing their shape and direction; he rests them on Lando's shoulders and (because he can't do this, not with Lando, not this) pushes. Not hard, not hard at all, only enough pressure to reverse the motion of their bodies and send them backwards, split them apart.

As Lando stumbles backwards, his mouth falls open (lips dark and gleaming, soft and swollen, don't look don't look) and he sucks in a startled breath, as though the loss of contact was a vacuum inside him. The sound skewers Billy like a knife, and he says, louder and harsher than he intended, "I said go to bed, Orlando. Sleep it off."

Lando's fingers go to his lips without permission, and he knows he is wide-eyed, shocked, and it takes everything he has to sublimate that expression, to extinguish it.

He hadn't expected it to feel like that. He hadn't expected Billy's tongue sliding between his lips, heated and silky. He forces his hands down, forces himself to stand up straight. He hadn't expected it to feel so good, and he especially hadn't expected it to end like that. He had thought Billy might pull away, but he hadn't expected to be kissed and then shoved, forced back like that, too abrupt to make sense of, and he can hear the harsh echo of Billy's voice in his ears, ringing.

And something feels like it's breaking inside Lando's head. Something is breaking.

"Don't you tell me what to do," he snarls, and his fists are clenched again (and he can't force them open this time), and there is fire in his gut and in his brain, some kind of foreign mixture of lust and fury.

"Don't you kiss me and then shove me, don't you bloody do that, William Boyd." He hears the lapse into the English profanity, and hates it, hates his lack of control, hates that there is no possibility, none of regaining that control now. He is stinging at Billy's use of Orlando (he hasn't been Orlando in more than a year now, and just hearing Bills say it like that, so bloody contemptuous, God, he sounds a fair bit like Lando's step-father, and that only makes him more furious), just stinging in general at being shoved away (kissed and then shoved away).

"What the hell is wrong with you?" he murmurs, softly, but not without heat, the edge of something steely and nasty glinting in his voice clearly enough that he can hear it himself.

He closes the distance between them without thought (and he is always surprised to discover that he is taller than Bills, every time he's this close it surprises him, because Bills always seems so big in his mind), and demands again: "Just what the hell is wrong with you, Bills?"

And so this is how it will go, Billy thinks, taking in the bone-white knuckles, the ribs and shoulders tensed like spikes, the unfocused hurt bleeding through the question. The heat between them, not lessened but shifting towards a new and darker tint.

He feels the pain and want and rage hiss outward with Lando's breath, their heads so close that the cloud of it brushes Billy's face, and he hears the question echo deep inside him: what the hell is wrong with you, Bills? And when it touches bottom, it sparks something hard and hot and mean in the smoldering unfairness of it all. The fire calls up a new mask to wait just behind the skin of his face: the soft and deadly smile of a confidence man, a man with nothing he fears losing. And in that moment, he realizes that by doing this, by pushing Lando away, he becomes a man with nothing left to lose.

Bladed words rise to his lips and he wants to bite them back, but he cannot keep the hard, sharp edge from his tongue. "There's nothing wrong with me," he says, calm and implacable, and finds he has accented the last word a hair more than he intended. The truth cuts deepest, his father used to tell him, and that's what he's speaking. "You don't know what I want. I fuck men, Orlando. Grown men, who know what they're doing." Lando's cheeks flush red and drain to white, and it's true, all of it, but not with the edge he's put behind it, not with the meaning that Lando must be hearing.

Because it's too late to turn back now, he feeds the flames in his gut a little higher and lets them drain his voice to absolute ice. "You don't understand. Don't assume that you do."

"Assume?" Lando repeats dumbly, and that low heat in his belly, the good heat, is dying, being crushed, ground slowly out by the look in Billy's eyes. He feels the distance between them, suddenly, negligible in actuality but vast and looming in other, more significant ways.

His hands have uncurled, and they feel itchy, palms burning and tingling, and he can't tell if he's burning with rage or nearly flattened with hurt. Can it be both? But his own voice sounds almost calm to his ears, although maybe not entirely steady when he says it again. "Assume?"

He no longer feels even slightly drunk.

The world is sharp around him, sharp and clear and clean, and once Bills had told him that the world seemed to go still during gunfights. The world went still and cold, time slowed down, and every measured breath was eternal, and the important thing, the most important thing, was to remember to look into your opponents eyes. You could read a man's intentions in his eyes, Billy said.

It's only one of the thousands of things Billy has told him over the course of the last two years, but it's very vivid in his mind in this moment.

Lando has never been in a gunfight. He's only drawn his gun twice, and neither time had he expected to have to use it. Billy had been there, both times, and Lando had known then, just as he knows now, that if shooting commenced, Billy would have shot Lando's opponent down before he could ever hope to get a shot off. It had been a given. No need for thought, no need to wonder. Billy would be there.

This, though, this feels... Is that what this is? The verbal equivalent of a gunfight, and one in which Lando hasn't even drawn his weapon?

God, he thinks it might be. And part of him wants this. It is bitter and terrible, feeling like this, and he can't quite label it, doesn't understand where it's coming from or what it means. Part of him is afire with humiliation and rage, but that part is buried deep by old habit, buried by the past certainty that if he couldn't control his temper, his step-father would by God do it for him, and if that meant laying Lando (Orlando) up for a few days with cracked ribs or a dislocated shoulder, well that had always been just fine with him.

Mostly he can't dismiss how it had felt to kiss Bills. How it had felt in the handful of seconds in which (his) Bills had kissed him back.

"You kissed me back," he says, and he isn't sure how he feels, that he can't quite hold onto that bitter-sharp edge of clarity, that his voice sounds uncertain, still angry, but more hurt than enraged. "I'm not assuming that. You kissed me back."

And, Please, he thinks, unable to quite stop the prayer, though it's been a long while since he'd prayed in any way that his mum would've recognized as such. Please, he kissed me back. Please, God.

But he doesn't look away from Billy's eyes, because he is a fast learner, and William Boyd is an excellent teacher, and he isn't sure he even believes in God.

It's not a blow, it's not even delivered like one, but it's enough to make the fire fueling him waver and shrink. The tone of Lando's voice, about a decade older than the expression in his eyes, and that statement. Not a challenge, not an attack. One fact, and one that threatens to slice straight through Billy's careful front.

He'd kissed Lando back. Without thinking first. For a few brief seconds, without thinking at all. And just thinking of it now is enough to make the sensation spill back over him, the heat and give. He wanted Lando. Wants. The evidence is incontrovertible, and he cannot lie to himself about it.

But the fact that he wants Lando enough that he could just take like that, heedless of the cost, is further proof that Billy cannot, must not, have him. Proof he cannot keep Lando safe, especially from himself. Lando is his weakness, and Billy knows on a level beyond thought or questioning that if he gives into this, that weakness will destroy its cause.

Because that is the way the world works. And if he is going to protect Lando, the only thing he can do is to cut all the ties Lando has to him, slice through them and cauterize the wound. If he does that now, before the want in Lando's eyes coalesces into something more essential, he may yet leave Lando whole. Divested of a growth, and not a limb. And more than Billy wants anything, he wants never to look in Lando's eyes and see that pieces have gone lost or broken.

The decision has been made, and he will not think about its consequences to himself, but he does not need to. Billy knows what it is to bleed.

And just because he cannot lie to himself does not mean he cannot lie to Lando. He is a poker player. He has taught Lando everything he needs to know, but not everything he could know. He has taught Lando what Lando permitted Billy to teach him, and lying is not among those skills. Lando still acts from the core that makes him who he is, and he cannot do otherwise. But when the stakes are high enough, Billy can do whatever he has to. So he feeds the fire on his resolution, finds the lie with the greatest amount of truth in it, and wields it like a blade. Razor-sharp and burnt clean.

"Of course I kissed you back," Billy answers slowly, flavoring the words with enough incredulity that the pause preceding them will sound like disbelief and not hesitation. "I would've kissed anyone. A mouth is a mouth, kid, and it'd take anyone a second to remember who that mouth is attached to."

Lando actually staggers, like he's been gut-punched, and it takes everything Billy has to continue. With every ounce of concentration, he summons up his smirk and slides it on (like a glove; like a noose).

"But that doesn't mean anything." Billy arches an eyebrow. "Do you really think that if I wanted you, I wouldn't have had you long ago and been done with it? Do you really think I couldn't have just taken you?" He hones the edges on the words ever-sharper, and watches singlemindedly for a sign that he's won this hand, that he's found his mark.

"It meant nothing, Orlando. It means nothing."

Lando had been braced for an attack, but when it comes, it isn't the kind of thing he can brace against.

It's nothing he knows how to defend against.

You started this, he tells himself, and ignores the burn of tears that prickle his open eyes. It's too late to back out now.

But he doesn't know how. Doesn't know if it can be finished in any way that he would want to see it end, and he feels sick, he feels feverishly hot even as his skin prickles with chills.

He recognizes words used to hurt, words used as weapons, like knives (God knows he's seen it done enough to know it, had it done to him, when his step-father couldn't be arsed to use his fists), and there's no way to pretend that Billy hadn't done it deliberately, purposefully. Lando sees it clearly in his eyes. He had known that Billy could do this. He just hadn't known Billy could do it to him.

And Lando is bleeding.

Billy is calm and still, not bleeding; Lando doesn't know how to use words like knives, not like that, and if he did... even if he did, well, he wouldn't. There are things he knows about Billy. Things about his parents' deaths, things about the way his brother had died (hung), things that might make Bills bleed even if Lando wielded words-as-knives clumsily (which he would), but he can't do that.

There are differences between them. He's always known that, but it has never been so clear.

And it's stupid, but he wants to kiss Bills again; all of the anger (which wasn't much to begin with, pathetic really, no wonder Bills isn't bloody interested) has just poured out of him (maybe through the word-wounds Billy has stabbed into his mind), and all he wants is to kiss Bills again, as if that could make things right.

"It doesn't mean nothing," he says; his voice sounds husked out and hollow like a gourd rattle, full of tick-clicking seeds, but otherwise empty. "I don't believe you."

But he does, at least a little. He is no asset to Billy, and he's always known it, but it had never bothered him. Billy had seemed to want him there, liability or not, and he had always accepted that. But he wonders, now, about Billy saying that Lando won't need him for very long, wonders if maybe what he really meant to say is that that he won't need (doesn't want) Lando around for much longer.

Maybe, as carefully as he'd tried to conceal this from Bills, he'd seen it coming on, and had already been thinking on how to get himself shut of Lando.

No, he thinks sharply, but his sharpness of mind doesn't have the same affect as Billy's sharp words, and he isn't convinced that he's wrong.

Maybe Bills wants him to go.

But he can't quite stop his hand when it reaches for Bills, like it can move under it's own power and isn't interested in asking for Lando's permission, and Billy's cheek is warm, the angle of his jaw hard and prickling with a days growth of stubble, and Lando can feel the clench and jerk of the muscle under his palm, and this is a little closer to what he had hoped would happen when he'd run his hands across Billy's back, if he doesn't look at Billy's eyes, if he looks, instead, at Billy's mouth, he could almost pretend the last several minutes had never happened.

It takes everything Billy has not to respond to that touch. The muscles of his face want to yield to the warmth of Lando's palm, his mouth wants to drift slowly open, his whole upper body is trying to lean into the intensity of Lando's attention.

Because he has so little choice in the matter, he lays all his chips on the effectiveness of non-response and holds himself unmoving. He watches stoically as Lando's gaze flickers from his eyes to his mouth and back again. He does not turn his head when Lando's fingers shift against his face. When Lando's head bends slowly forward, Billy does not lean into the almost-kiss, and he does not pull away. He stands, Lando's breath brushing hesitantly across his lips, and he waits.

Five seconds go by. Fifteen. Then Lando's hand begins to tremble, and he jerks it away from Billy's face like his skin had started to burn. Stumbling back a step, he sucks a breath in, quiet and harsh, and stares into Billy's eyes in a mixture of pleading and desperation.

Billy does not let his eyes answer.

"That's enough, Orlando," he says, his voice still and implacable. Hollow, like the echo from the bottom of a well. To Billy's ears, his words sound like they're coming from a place too far down to see. "Get your things. You're going to find another place to sleep tonight."

There are endless moments of fury, something so strong and hard and bright that he can't see past it. He can't think past it, he doesn't even exist outside of its bounds. It's like nothing he's ever felt before, it's stronger than any anger or rage he has ever imagined, stronger than anything he'd felt for anyone, and he understands that you can't ever hate anyone like you can hate someone you love.

For maybe three seconds, maybe as long as five, he hates Billy absolutely, and it's probably a good thing that his gun is in the chair, out of his reach -- he can see it, he can almost feel it in his hand, the way the butt feels against his palm, smooth and powerful and cool -- because for several bare, aching seconds, he thinks he could use it. He thinks he could hold it in his hand and point it at Billy and feel the slight jerk as he pulls the hammer back, hear the deadly click, pull gently, gently on the trigger, hear the noise of it, the immense depth of sound, feel it kick, feel it jerk, smell the acrid burn of gunpowder in his nose, see Billy's body jerk back, see him fall, see his face, the surprise (and it would surprise him, Lando knows this, because Lando has never killed anyone, has never so much as hurt anyone, and Billy has never teased him about it, but there is something in Billy's eyes, something flat and hard and cutting, that says he knows Lando will not go for the gun, and he is right, Lando won't, but Billy is wrong, too, because Lando also knows that he could, God, he could), the understanding of pain beyond comprehension, and he almost wants that. For a few seconds, he thinks it would be easier than this.

It would be easier than what will happen now, what has to happen now.

But it passes (although he also understands that he will have to live forever with the knowledge that he could have done it, can do it, will be able to kill, if it should ever come to it), the urge passes, and he feels his hands uncurl (he isn't sure when they had curled to begin with, but when they uncurl he is aware that his palms are stinging, slick, bleeding) and his shoulders unknot and his face relaxes into nothingness, into emptiness, as smooth and impassive as any poker face he's ever managed, better, even, a perfection of a non-expression.

That thought almost makes him smile, but he doesn't. That would ruin the perfection of it, after all.

Billy is watching him, but Lando doesn't bother with searching his face. It doesn't matter anymore, anyhow. This is done. There isn't anything else to do but let it go.

He doesn't get his things, though.

He leaves his pistol on the chair -- he doesn't want to touch it, ever -- and his bedroll and saddlebags where they are lying at the foot of his bed. He has enough money in his pocket to replace it, and they are things he doesn't want anymore. They are the past. They never really belonged to him anyway. Nothing in this room was ever really his, no matter how much he might wish it to be different.

He thinks he'll go without speaking. Maybe if he was as strong as Bills, he even would have.

He's not, though, and he pauses in the door. Doesn't look, but pauses.

"Goodbye, Bills."

He doesn't recognize his own voice, and he wonders if it will go back to normal sometime.

Billy doesn't move when Lando speaks, but the sound of the door closing softly (softly, God, after all that) behind him almost rocks him forward like a blow to the back. It doesn't, quite, and he stands where Lando left him, bones humming like rails seconds after the train has thundered past and out of sight. He stands, surrounded by the silence in which Lando's last words don't echo, which isn't shaken by a door that wasn't slammed, and he almost lets himself believe that if he doesn't move, if he doesn't do anything but breathe, this night will be over, and when it ends, he will find Lando tangled in the bedding and sleeping soundly, limbs licked by the early-morning sun.

Almost.

In the moment when Lando's eyes had gone raw and metal-hard (and he doesn't want to think about that now, can't think about it, about that expression he'd never seen in Lando's eyes), he hadn't been sure if Lando would move for the gun. It was there; Lando could have, easily, and Billy couldn't have done anything about it. Lando could have killed him; he is an excellent shot even if he never uses those skills. Things like that come easily to Lando. Most things come easily to Lando.

But Billy hadn't taught Lando to kill -- not that it really needs teaching. Lando isn't made for killing, it isn't in him, not like cards and aim and horses and imitation are in him. Lando had even disliked the thought of Billy killing for him -- Billy had offered once, offered to kill Lando's stepfather (because he deserves it, the bastard), but Lando had said no, it would hurt his mother.

But most people, pushed hard enough, can find it in them to do things against their nature. And for that moment, Billy'd thought he had pushed too hard.

The fire in his gut is smoldering to darkness, flames flickering out to hot coals and smoke. It is quieter somehow, but it hurts more, hurts physically, like he's burning from inside out. Like someone has dropped a match down his throat.

Billy considers running after Lando. He thinks about chasing him down, pulling at his wrist. Returning that almost-kiss.

He cannot. Not after what he's done. He made the right decision, the only decision he could make, and if he goes after him now, even if Lando doesn't think him a lunatic, even if Lando didn't strike him on the spot, it'd make all the pain he's caused (felt) in these last minutes pointless. And all the pain that kiss would yet bring them would be on his head.

Billy will not run after him, and Billy knows that Lando will not come back to him, and it is better this way. He'll leave at dawn, pay the bill for another night and leave Lando's things on the furniture for when he returns to collect them (he will, he must, they're his and Billy bought them for him, and Billy knows he does not need and cannot bear to take them with him, to look at them again). He will go back to the solitary cycle of ranch work and quiet fires and hotel rooms and High Stakes, and he will live as he lived before, for years. And Lando will learn that he doesn't need Billy, will realize that he never really wanted him, and he will succeed, and he will be fine.

Lando will be fine, and Billy will stay here tonight and ride in the morning. And it is better this way.


	3. Outing: Cate, Harry, Yuma, 1874

Fourteen days after he meets Cate Blanchett, she is on Harry's arm.

He is not surprised, of course. Matter of time, considering.

Granted, it had taken some real effort and attention to arrange things just so, not to mention rather more money than Harry really wants to think about just now -- though in another four hours or so, Harry thinks he'll just about break even as far as the theater company goes, at least, as he made a rather good deal with the troupe manager which might have actually turned him a tidy sum if he hadn't laid out so much to get them here in such short order -- but things are going along much as he figured they would.

And the cost of the show itself is a pittance compared to the cost of the gloves he'd gifted her with less than half an hour ago.

They cost a Goddamned fortune, and he'd been uncertain enough about them right up to the last minute that he nearly hadn't given them to her.

They're old, those gloves (one of which he can see from the corner of his eye, resting on his forearm, glittering little sparks of reflected gold from the gas lamps along the sidewalk), from the late 1700's according to the man who sold them to Harry, and Harry guesses they must have multiplied in value every year. They cost near as much as the Royale had cost him, though they're in better condition than it had been at the time, Harry admits, and it took Harry more than an hour to decide to buy them in the shop (in San Francisco), time spent wavering in a manner those who knew him would've been frankly amazed to see.

Harry isn't the waffling type. He also isn't the type to buy frivolous and ridiculously expensive gifts for ladies of less than sterling repute, but there is something about this particular lady that itches at him, not the least of it the long week that passed after the poker game at Bailey's house with Harry hearing nary a word from Miss Blanchett.

Harry also isn't the type to buy something that isn't a sure thing, or close enough as to make no never mind, and the gloves don't impress him as a sure thing while he's in the store. There are finer things, jewelry and dresses and fur wraps, things that he knows women value and has had success with in the past as gifts, and the gloves -- while clearly lovely and carefully crafted and meticulously decorated with tiny nubbins of gold and seed pearls and embroidery -- seem lesser, somehow.

But propriety forbids gifts like jewels and furs for a woman he's decided he's going to treat as respectable (because he has a feeling about her, about what will move her), no matter the talk and rumors that surround her, and in the end he decides the gloves are the best he can do.

He knew as soon as she looked at them that he'd not only made a good choice, buying them, but that there possibly wasn't a better choice he could have made. The gleam of surprise and pleasure in her eyes, the bright, flushed glow of her cheeks, is enough to make him forget the money entirely for a few minutes, and her smile is a dividend Harry is quite happy to collect and collect again as they walk the short distance between the Archer House and the theater, and though they haven't actually exchanged much in the way of talk (pleasantries and greetings, and sincere compliments, on Harry's part at least, on how well they each look tonight), Harry is sure she's pleased. He suspects she hasn't said much because she's pleased, and perhaps a little flustered, and he's content to leave it that way until she recovers her composure.

He thinks it's a damned good start, though he's not sure what it is, exactly, he's starting.

Cate is, to put not too fine a point on it, shockingly flustered.

The animal, her body, knows its job well enough to cover for her. She walks sedately at Harry's side, her hand on his arm, and nods and smiles to those who condescend (or are forced, by Harry's money and manner, she guesses) to acknowledge her, while declining to notice those who cut her dead. Cate's taking it for granted that the draw of a theatrical entertainment in Yuma is enough to overcome the scruples of even the most exacting townspeople. The fact that the entire event is for her benefit, however, doesn't mean they have to notice her.

"Miss Blanchett, may I present Captain Everett?" Harry says, and Cate willows her waist and gives Everett her hand to bow over.

Cate drops her gaze modestly, and Everett's clearly very taken with her. If he only knew that Cate's eyes are downcast so that she can admire the way her glove sparkles under the lights.

The gloves are, quite simply, the most magnificent gift Cate has ever received. She has no doubt that they cost as much as the parterre of diamonds that allowed her to leave San Francisco carrying little more than the clothes on her back. But diamonds, from a man who is not one's husband or father, are a gift fit only for a whore. No decent woman can accept anything of value, or anything of her apparel, from a man she is not related too. Candy, flowers, books are the rule; gloves are a special case, a token that might be offered by and accepted from an esteemed admirer without compromising the lady's dignity.

Harry's gift is a magnificent sleight-of-hand, or perhaps of-morality, being too rich and ostentatious to ever qualify as proper, yet paying service of form to the rules.

They make their way upstairs to the front box. Harry holds the curtain aside for Cate himself, despite the hovering attentions of an usher. Harry also helps Cate off with her wrap – it's a mass of diaphanous blond veiling that doesn't hide so much as the glow of her skin, but it's customary for her behave as if it's too much for her to manage alone. Harry's fingers graze across the nape of her neck as he lifts the veiling away, and Cate feels the warm rough contact along the way down her spine. She snaps her fan open abruptly and flicks it hard enough to stir the tendrils of her hair around her forehead.

Harry pulls her chair out for her and Cate sweeps the bulk of her low-slung bustle and train to one side and sits down. Harry leans on the back of her chair, pointing out several town notables in the boxes on the other side of the house.

It takes Cate a moment to understand that he's pointing out only men, only men he says are rich or at least well-off; most of them are young and well-favored, and the others are well-favored and well-dressed.

He's pointing out potential clients.

Cate feels a fierce heat sweep over her skin under her clothes. She has to remind herself sternly that her engagement with Harry is for the theater only tonight; he made a point of saying that he would walk her back to her hotel after the show. But damn it, it's only by main force of will that she doesn't twist in her chair and catch hold of his neck with her gloved fingers and pull him down to her, down to her mouth that's almost throbbing for want of his kiss (hard, almost cold, she can imagine it all too clearly).

He's treating her not as a decent woman, nor as a whore, but as exactly what she is. A highly priced courtesan who remembers with every inch of her skin what it is to be a lady.

Soon, Cate promises herself. Soon.

It's warm in the theater and warmer still in the box, but Harry doesn't think that's the reason behind Miss Blanchett's fetchingly flushed face.

He settles in beside her, aware of her as he is only occasionally aware of another person, as a kind of low, thrumming, intensely gratifying itch just under his skin. He feels like this, sometimes, during a particularly good business deal, and less often on a particularly challenging hunt; people he doesn't intend to better at either business or sport don't usually bring it out in him.

He muses on it for a moment, thinking it's because she feels a bit like both business and sport to him, and then dismisses it. He's not all that interested in figuring it out. It is, and that's generally enough for Harry.

He's never outright told her that this entire production is his doing, and for no reason other than to pique her interest, but he highly doubts that she doesn't know. He'll be sorely disappointed if she hasn't figured it out, anyhow.

As it is, he can't quite stop himself from dipping into the kind of conversational habits that he uses in business, the sort of "idle" back and forth that seems to merely pass the time, but actually fills in the blank spaces in Harry's head when he's trying to build a steady image of his opponent.

Because treating her almost like an opponent feels perfectly natural.

"When I was a kid," he says, and leans toward her slightly in a way that allows him to take in a deep lungful of air that's scented with her, and, incidentally, to gaze at the rather pretty expanse of her neck and collarbones, "I used to catch frogs down to a creek that ran the back line of my Pa's property. The name of it was Whitehollow Creek. It was a boggy, dirt-brown trickle in most places, surrounded by brambles and sinkholes and the black husks of dead trees that still stood upright, mostly, but stank like wet, rotted logs."

She's turned to look at him, and her face is still a bit flushed, her lips still curling slightly upward, though he thinks maybe she doesn't know she's still smiling. Her eyes are bright, and in the gaslight, her hair looks like twisted ropes of gold floss. Harry has to curl a hand on his thigh to overcome the urge to touch it.

"It sounds charming," she says, her voice both dry and light, and he grins, because he knows it makes him look ten years younger and ten times nicer.

"It was, for an eight year old boy, at any road," he says, and her smile widens into something that isn't quite a grin, but is close. "Nobody bothered me there, and I was never bored. I thought, should I ever buy or build a house of my own, that I might call it Whitehollow, Miss Blanchett, and I'd be obliged if you'd tell me what you think of the name."

Cate drops her gaze, in precisely the same spirit that a fencer drops his blade, to encourage an opponent to drop his too. When she looks up again, she catches the upward swept of Harry's golden brown eyelashes as he too glances up.

"I think it's charming," she says. "It suits the locale – not pretentious, but not overly folksy – and it will give you occasion to explain the derivation, which casts you in a delightful light. What an earnest and artless child you were."

Cate nails the delivery of that, she sees, as Harry's eyebrow arches up. He's not at all sure she's not laughing at him, and he doesn't care one bit.

Cate decides not to sully that triumph with an attempt at more, so she turns her head away to examine the occupants of the next box, leaning coincidentally in a fashion that gives Harry the bare line of her shoulder blades down to the back of her bodice. Cate can almost swear she feels the furnace exhalation of his breath on her skin.

Harry, however, declines to accept this dismissal. He leans in, so close that the shoulder of his coat brushes her skin, and starts to make rude comments about the more po-faced members of the audience. Cate tries to stay serene, but his wicked sense of humor has her lifting her fan to hide her giggles from everyone but him.

When the curtain rises, Harry shifts his chair closer to hers, and leans in so that their faces are hardly a few inches apart. They watch the play (rather better acted than Cate had expected), making frequent whispered observations to each other, some regarding the play, some the audience, others just nonsensical jokes and teases that give them an excuse to tip their heads together behind Cate's fan.

At the intermission, Harry invites Cate to come outside to the lobby for a glass of champagne. He rises, offering his arm, and Cate stands. Her skirt has fouled on the leg of her chair, and she stumbles against him. Harry's hand splays over the hard-boned waist of her bodice, and Cate's hand spreads over the smooth cloth of his coat sleeve. She feels the muscle (hard and sleek) jump into high relief as he takes her weight.

His eyelids flicker down, and his eyes are shining golden under their shadows. Cate feels the blood burning in her cheeks. She steps back, kicking her train out of her way.

"Thank you," she murmurs, stepping away from him.

His hand lingers where it is until she shifts from under his touch, and goes out of the box. On the stairs, as Harry once again slips his arm under her hand, Cate glances aside to see Sutherland watching her thoughtfully. Cate smiles vividly, but there's no answering curl to Sutherland's lips.

Harry doesn't bother to restrain the sharp, bared-teeth-masquerading-as-a-smile that wants to draw his lips back when he sees Sutherland glance first at the lady, and then at Harry. He slides his hand over the top of Miss Blanchett's, resting on his arm, and guides her skillfully away from Sutherland's dour disapproval.

Either she doesn't know what he's doing, or she merely chooses not to object; either way works for Harry. He retrieves a pair of champagne flutes from a passing usher and tips one toward her, an offer. She accepts, her head tilted so that her eyes barely brush his face from beneath her lashes, and Harry can almost feel the soft brush of her gaze.

He carefully steers her around those that he suspects would snub or obliquely insult her, but he can't monopolize her attention in a social setting, as much as he might like to. Instead he begins a round of careful introductions, designed to bring her attention to certain people (most of whom he'd already pointed out to her from the box) as much as to demonstrate his influence among his peers.

"That's Alain MacKinneh," he murmurs as they break away from Paul McBride and are momentarily drifting more or less aimlessly through the crowd. "The woman he's with is his mistress, not his wife." Cate's brow quirks upward slightly, but she makes no comment. Harry takes advantage of the crowd to lean close enough that his breath gusts across her naked throat, to tell her, "That's a man in need of gentle companionship, as his wife is a harridan and his mistress another. I'll never understand what possesses a man to saddle himself with a jealous woman."

Cate knows what the right – what the politic - answer to that is. She knows that she should drop her gaze, and soften her expression, and say very quietly

"neither do I."

Then she can look up, tipping her head so that she's gazing at him from the corners of her eyes. She can reassure him that she, at least, will never make inconvenient demands on his time or attention or reputation. She can convince him that she, at least, will always be yielding and compliant and comfortable for him.

Or

she can offer him something else. Something she suspects he will value a good deal more than feigned mildness. Something – she barely lets herself think this – she will feel a far fiercer pleasure in giving him.

Cate doesn't drop her gaze; instead, she lifts her chin and lengthens her spine so that she's practically looking him levelly in the eye. When she speaks, her voice is pitched to the soft clarity of an intimate conversation between friends, not the coquettish murmur of flirtation.

"They do for same reason women saddle themselves with jealous men … stupidity, and a complete lack of imagination."

There's a second when Harry's eyes flicker, narrowing, and Cate's breath stops in her throat. She waits, wild with the thrill of a real risk, to see if he's what she so deliciously suspects he might be.

A match for her. A real match.

Her eyes are wicked and gleaming, her color high, and for a moment Harry says nothing, watching her color rise, watching the pulse quiver in her throat. She gives no other sign that she knows she's poking a big damned dog with a stick, but he's certain she knows it. Her brows are slightly arched in challenge, and it feels good to regard her through slitted eyes. Feels like business, feels like the hunt, feels like foreplay.

She's something, she is indeed, smart and bold and cool and clever, and he'd sure as hell like the chance of finding out the extent of her intellect.

"Myself, I've always thought of it as a symptom of fear," he drawls, and she relaxes minutely, her lips curling faintly. "Fear of not being able to manage anything better, if you take my meaning? Settling." He takes a drink of champagne and regards her over the rim of the flute, and smiles at her. He's not a man of charm, but he knows he's handsome enough, strong enough, and smart enough to get the job done, and that's always been enough for him. He finds it odd to wish he was handier with pretty words. "Fear of not finding a partner, I reckon. An equal."

Cate lets her gaze slide away and then back, lets her mouth curl with a smile of unfeigned pleasure.

When the bell rings for the second half, Cate takes Harry's arm and lets him bring her back upstairs. Something has shifted between them already; they no longer play to each other, no longer execute the steps of advance and withdrawal. Without meaning to, they echo each other's stance and gestures: when Harry turns his head to glance at someone in the audience, Cate finds her own gaze sweeping in the same direction. When Cate rests her hand on the balustrade of the box, her fan hanging from her wrist, Harry's hand finds it way to the same place. They take occasional looks at each other, no longer smiling or even speaking when they do, but simply looking.

After the show, when the spectators spill out onto the street, Cate takes Harry's arm again and they begin to walk slowly back towards the Archer House. Cate lengthens her stride so that she's moving with the same indolent ease as Harry.

"Thank you," Cate says, turning her head to look at him.

Harry lifts an eyebrow.

"For such an enjoyable evening. For introducing me to so many – charming – people. For ... the gift."

She passes one palm over the opposite wrist, caressing the gauntlet of the glove on that hand.

They come to a halt at the foot of the porch steps outside the Archer House.

"It's been my pleasure," Harry says, smiling. He thinks it's funny to find himself being so truthful with her; his experience with women hasn't prepared him to deal with one he doesn't have to lie to or pacify. He's not sure that he even knows what to do with such a woman, but he'd sure as hell like to find out. A woman like this is worth having, he thinks, even if it's only for a little while.

She hasn't removed her hand from his arm, and he makes no move to put a respectable distance between them. They both look at Archer House in silence for a few seconds.

It had been a respectable old place once, but times are harder now, and it's not what it used to be. The whitewash is faded to grey and the big, multi-paned glass window that faces the street -- it had once been Archer House's pride and glory, a hundred or more panes the size of your fist, diamond shaped, and stretching half the length of the front of the house -- has several missing panes of glass, and the front porch and stairs sag on either end, as though Archer House has developed a distinct frown.

"I won't ask again," he says, and sees her turn to look at him from the corner of his eye. "I ain't the sort of man to browbeat a woman, and it's not my business anyhow. But I want to remind you of the offer I made you at Baily's, just so you're aware it still stands. If you've an eye to moving house, I'll make you an honest deal, Ma'am, and set no expectations on you."

Cate's sorely tempted to accept Harry's offer here and now; she can't afford financially to move to better quarters just yet, but she can't afford professionally to stay at Archer House much longer. Men give far more lavishly to a woman who seems to have no need of their gifts. On the other hand, though, Cate suspects that Harry will remain most interested in her while he doesn't feel he quite has her. Living under his roof, not matter how fair the business arrangement between them, might suggest too much particularity – to Harry, no less than to the other men Cate is going to need.

"That is a very kind offer," she says at last. "I will think seriously about it."

Harry's mouth flexes slightly, in a gesture that might equally be a stifled smile or stifled scowl.

Cate's gaze snags on that motion, and she's suddenly aware of every inch of her skin, of the blood beating thick and warm in her own lips and fingertips, of the searing weight of Harry's stare on her face and throat and shoulders. Harry's mouth opens very slightly, but he doesn't speak, and Cate has a sudden surging certainty that he never intended to speak, that the gesture was meant entirely as a test of her attention.

Cate drags her line of sight up to his eyes, and yes, there's a world of hard-edged evaluation there. Cate lifts her chin up until the weight of her hair on the nape of her neck takes her head past the tipping point, and she feels the stretch all down her throat and across the skin of her collarbones. They're standing almost toe to toe, her hand still on his coat sleeve. Cate makes no effort to look away, to hide the heavy lazy desire coursing through her.

Let him see that she wants him, she thinks.

But let him also see that it gives him no power over her.

"Goodnight, Mister Sinclair," Cate says.

There's a long beat when neither of them move except for the tidal sway of their breathing, which seems to have taken on a common rise and fall. Cate finally drops her gaze again, meaning to break the connection between them, but her eyes are once again snared the careful curve of Harry's mouth.

"Good night, Miss Blanchett," Harry says automatically, but neither of them actually move, and the line of her throat with her head tipped back seems to have burned itself into the backs of Harry's eyes.

She's not going to move into the Royale. He's sure of it, absolutely certain, and he can understand it as a rational, intelligent business decision -- if she's working with the lack of capital that he suspects she's working with, she absolutely cannot appear to have any particular preference, it's imperative that she be seen as completely free of romantic ties -- while still not liking it.

He'd take care of her, and he thinks she knows that, but he doesn't say it. Mayhap it's best that he doesn't, anyhow. She's an independent woman, and he knows himself well enough to understand that's a good deal of what he admires about her. Independent and too smart to put herself in a position of dependency if she can avoid doing it. He admires her foresight, he truly does.

But he wants her, and he's not used to not getting what he wants. And he has no plans to get used to it.

He wants her, and he means to have her. He'll be patient, for now; he can afford to do that. But he means to have her in the end.

He believes the smoky desire in her eyes is real; he believes that the way her eyes are lingering on his mouth is truth and not guile, but even if it is... Well, it doesn't matter.

If it's guile, it's the best damned performance he's ever seen, and she's earned the desire burning low and tight in Harry's belly.

"I mean to kiss you," he says, his voice emerging deeper and throatier than he expected it to; it's more of an advantage than he gives his other business rivals, but he gives it to her without a second thought, because while they might be rivals now, both of them vying for control of a potential partnership, of a sort, that doesn't change the fact that it could be an actual partnership in the end, and it's never a good idea to build one of those by taking advantage. He can see the quick flutter of her heartbeat in the pale, smooth column of her neck, and he sees when she stops breathing for a few long seconds, her breasts pressing tight against the material of her bodice from the expansion of her chest.

Harry's eyes flicker from her throat to her red lips and then up to her bright eyes. "I mean to kiss you, Cate, so if you're planning on running away, I'd be obliged if you'd do it now, before I make a fool of myself." Even as he says it, though, he's sliding one hand up to cup her elbow, and he thinks it's probably too late to avoid making a fool of himself.

Harry's already leaning in, jaw set and eyes downcast, his gaze riveted on Cate's mouth. Cate stands her ground – his fingers tighten on her elbow and she will never know for sure if she could have broken his grip on her, if he would have let her go – but she does pull her chin back fractionally, her lips parting as she inhales sharply, her ribs pushing painfully against the constriction of her bodice.

Harry hesitates, his eyelids snapping upwards as he fixes her with a glance, his mouth only inches from hers. And Cate decides.

She leans in abruptly, urgently, tilting her chin so that their mouths come together perfectly. The smell of his skin – dark woody cologne and the sweetness of fine-leaf tobacco and under that the incisive rank smell of a man – cuts through her, and she has to consciously hold her breath to a sharp outward rush, stifling the moan twisting low in her belly.

There's a long second when they stay just like that – lips parted but absolutely still, eyes open – and then Harry's mouth pushes against hers, finding the fit, and his tongue slides between her teeth. Cate takes hold of a fistful of the front of his coat, her forearm held rigid to maintain the distance between their bodies, even as she tips her head, letting him work the angle of her mouth, letting him push hard and press deep.

Harry's hand slides over her elbow, his fingers curving around the back of her arm, his thumb pressing into the front of her bicep.

Cate pulls back, slowly, but inexorably. Their mouths part with a sound that's almost shockingly organic. Cate doesn't bother to hide how hard she's breathing, how she's shaking to the tips of her fingers.

"Goodnight, Mister Sinclair," she says again, narrowing her eyes and dipping her chin.

For a moment, just after he loses the feel of her lips on his, Harry nearly forgets himself. He is unused to self-denial, and to the kinds of situations in which one has to practice it. He doesn't court virtuous ladies, and he never really has. The sort of women he keeps company with generally just take a bit of coaxing.

It's the tip of her head, carefully lowered, not deferentially -- not her -- but in a semblance of propriety, that finally reminds him of what he's doing, and where, and with whom.

He takes a step back, and manages a polite half-bow.

"Miss Blanchett. Thank you for your company." She doesn't quite flick her eyes up to his face (though he sees her lashes flick, as though she wants to) when she nods, and turns toward the house.

Harry watches her until she's safe inside, as is only proper, and only then does he turn in the direction of his own house, still smelling her in the air and feeling her on his lips.


	4. Final Hand: Billy, New Mexico, 1874

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=nobill1-1.jpg)

 

He doesn't divide things into before and after, just gets up the next morning already dressed in the patterns of his solitude and goes on as he has for years. He follows the route he'd planned toward the next tournament, riding a roving course across three states, never staying in a familiar place for too many nights at a time. It's a good plan, a prudent one, and more importantly, it ensures that their paths cannot cross by chance.

After the choices he's made, it would be unforgiveable to allow that.

So he works ranch jobs for strangers, avoids the small stakes tables, says little to anyone and sticks to the trails for days on end. His vigilance fits seamless and easy on his skin, as though he'd never shed it, and he wonders, sometimes, if he ever did. There had been a slow lessening of tension: a vise infintisemally unscrewed, silent easing in a spring pulled taut; he knows this, but cannot recall it. Those memories have been fenced out, along with the space they would be filling, and so he never quite unlatches the gate. Some nights, he considers his caution and cannot remember when it started, but it doesn't matter now. This constellation of habits will keep him alive whether or not he knows what he's guarding against. He presses on with the knowledge of those memories and no access to the sensations they contain. In town, he sleeps fully clothed, his guns in reach.

And when the end comes, it comes very quickly, and none of it does him any good.

They kick down the door of his rented room well before dawn, and he's firing almost before his eyes are open. Hits one, two, but the second tumbles forward at a shove from the third, and the falling body knocks the guns out of Billy's hands. And they're on him, four or five, fists brutal, another barking orders in the background. He thrashes, strikes out wildly, until someone forces a sack over his head and hits him hard across the crown.

He spends an unknown time cast loose in dark waters, occasionally lurching upward into a painful rolling rhythm, roughness at his wrists, and a suffocating closeness that drives him back down into the currents again. Eventually he surfaces, head pounding, with the taste of bile in his throat. They've tied him upright in the saddle, and from the feel of his body and the burnt light filtering through the rough canvas, they've been riding for hours. He's dizzily testing the knots when the horse drops to a walk and stops. There are murmurs, footsteps in front of him (likely tying the horse, should he try to drive it blindly back into the desert), and then another horse steps into place beside him. He feels something brush against his leg and tries not to flinch back. Hears spurs.

The snik of the knife is terrifyingly close, and he freezes as it slices through the ropes at his neck. The sack is pulled off, and the dry wind hits him with a rush, blowing sand into his eyes. Billy blinks the sting away, blinks his vision into some semblance of focus on the large dark figure looming in front of a bloody sunset. He can't see features (can't get his eyes to work well enough for that, not with the light behind), but there's a slash of white teeth. Gloved hand flipping the switchblade closed. Silvered edge of a badge.

"Welcome to Hell, William Boyd," Marshall Urban says, and Billy can hear the teeth in the grin.


	5. Facade: Lando, Callahan, Texas, 1875

If nothing else, Bills taught him that sometimes there really isn't a reason for things happening. Sometimes things just do, and it's random, nothing you could ever anticipate or control, and when they do, you just have to handle it.

Of course, that isn't the only thing Bills taught him.

But Lando thinks, lying in bed after what by any standards has been a fairly bloody trying night, that it may have been one of the most important ones.

Nights like this, he misses Billy like a physical ache, something hot and throbbing embedded beneath his breastbone. Nights like this, he'd give almost anything to tell Billy his troubles and get Billy's stolid, pragmatic brand of advice.

But if Billy was here, likely Lando wouldn't be in the kind of situation that needs that sort of advice.

\--

Two months and two days after Lando leaves Billy in a hostelery in Helena, Texas, he becomes acquainted with Julien La Fleur. It happens, as such things do, out of necessity rather than premeditation.

\--

He's in a saloon in Callahan City, sitting at a table in the corner and nursing a lukewarm tumbler of whiskey. It's his first day in town, which means he's watching, not playing. It hasn't taken him long to settle into this habit. Two fistfights and one aborted gunfight -- only subverted by a sympathetic if not exactly friendly barback with a loaded shotgun beneath the bar -- had been plenty to convince him of the wisdom of this habit.

When he's new in town, he never plays until the second day. He spends the first day drinking lightly and rolling smoke after smoke on scarred and battered tabletops while he listens and watches, until he has a pretty clear idea who to play and who to avoid.

It's in this way that he first hears Billy's name from someone who isn't aware of his connection with Bills.

\--

"When does Dancy's tournament line up, anyhow?" a tall, moustached man in a battered grey duster asks his tablemate. They are the only two blokes currently within easy earshot of Lando, but it's still early yet. The saloon won't start to really fill up until dusk, and it usually takes a few hours for him to get a feel for a place. He doesn't look up, though he's abruptly a lot more interested in the idle conversation coming from that direction.

He's heard of Dancy. Bills had talked about Dancy's game as Lando's first real go at something for decent stakes, something not too big, but big enough to attract players good enough to test Lando's skill. That was before… everything, of course.

"Middle of May," the other bloke at the table answers, and then leans to one side to spit a stream of tobacco juice into a brass spittoon near his left boot. Lando sees that the bloke's left cheek is scarred, three closely spaced furrows that bisect his eyebrow and curve all the way down his cheek to within a half-inch of his upper lift. A big cat, it looks like to Lando, mountain lion maybe, and he guesses the bloke was lucky not to lose that eye. As it is, the scar makes him look just on the good side of fierce, rakish rather than disfigured. Then the bloke wipes the back of his hand across his chin, and Lando catches sight of a long, yellowish stain on the back of his hand.

Nasty, he thinks, and then is amused at himself, at his mother's opinion settling into his own mind like it has always been his own.

"It's getting bigger ever' year," the scarred bloke drawls, and takes a swig from the dubious looking glass in front of him. Lando winces internally at the idea of drinking through a mouthful of tobacco. "Hear near t' thirty players hit the last one."

The bloke with the moustache appears to mull this over for a few moments. "What players for this one, d'ya think?" he finally asks, and Lando silently thanks him for his curiosity.

"Not likely to be too many Faces," disgusting-habit-bloke opines, and then leans over to spit again. Lando focuses his attention on the mirror behind the bar twenty feet away and pretends he doesn't see the bloke wipe his chin with the back of his hand again from the corner of his eye. "Not big enough, not yet. Duncan, mebbe. He's done the last two. The Wilson boys, like as not."

Lando steadies his face and takes a mouthful of whiskey, in case his interior wince overcomes his skill. The Wilson boys -- Owen and Luke -- had been enthusiastic participants in one of the two fistfights in Lando's not-so-distant past. They didn't start it, no, but they sure as hell jumped in like it was good fun once it got going. One of them -- Lando doesn't really remember which bloody one, they look disarmingly similar, considering their differences in coloration -- had landed a fist to Lando's temple that had him hearing a high-pitched and thoroughly annoying keening noise for two days afterward.

"Or maybe not," the bloke continues (pause, spit, wipe). "Might be they's still in jail down to El Paso."

Moustache laughs spitefully at that and mutters something under his breath that Lando suspects is a less-than-flattering opinion of the personalities of said Wilson boys. Lando silently agrees with it, whatever it had been.

"Boyd, prob'ly," scar-face says, and Lando goes still, a mouthful of whiskey burning his tongue, unswallowed, forgotten for long seconds. "I heard tell he was around here a few months back anyhow, and he usually turns up if he's close. Though I also heard --" the bloke's voice goes low, but Lando doesn't have any trouble picking it out in the afternoon near-silence, "--that he ain't playin' the tables jus' now. I heard he got himself a partner, just a boy, and is playin' teacher instead of poker."

There is something subtly insinuating in the bloke's voice that makes Lando tight and tense, makes his fists want to curl. He forces his hands down to his coat, directs one to open and the other to dip inside, and retrieves his tobacco pouch from the interior pocket. Slowly, methodically, he rolls a cigarette, forcing his mind into the slow, quiet space that he plays cards in, away from Billy and memory and the still-fierce ache that he can't do anything about anyhow.

"Is that so," Moustache asks, and there is ugly laughter lurking in his voice that sends tight coils of anger spiraling in the pit of Lando's belly, and the quiet calm of sitting at a table with the cards slick in his hand and his mind taut and alert for signs from the other players just slides right out of his grip. He fumbles the cigarette paper, damp from his sweaty hands, and it tears silently. "What's 'e teachin' 'im, a fella might wonder?" Moustache chuckles.

His mate laughs. "A fella might, at that," he agrees. "I heard he was pretty as a girl, Boyd's partner. Not that Boyd'd be interested in a girl."

Lando rolls the crumpled cigarette paper in his hand into a ball and tucks it into the pouch, thumbs another free, and begins again. The slow roll of rage in his belly is just the kind of thing Bills would have urged him to guard against, hold back, keep to himself for the sake of keeping his business his own. He's managing it, by God; by the skin of his teeth, but he's managing it.

"Damn good card player though, Boyd," scar-face says, and it's almost a sigh. Lando feels absurdly grateful for the turn in the conversation that lets him push the rest away and focus on what's being said.

"Hell, yeah," moustache agrees, sounding almost surprised that it needs to be said. "I got no interest in playin' him, tell the truth. Ain't no point to it."

Scar-face nods, and Lando thinks, Bloody well right there isn't; not for you. "The kid, too, I heard," scar-face adds (and spits), and the iron tension in Lando's spine begins to loosen somewhat. "A natural, Dean Clancy tol' me. Played the kid a few months back, said Boyd just leaned back against the bar and watched and stood real still. Dean said the kid jus' wiped 'em out. Balls of brass, he said, kid could bluff his way past the damned grim reaper hisself."

Moustache laughs, but not like he doesn't believe it. More like he's showing his appreciation for his mate's story-telling abilities. Lando sticks his smoke between his lips and digs for a match, now feeling slightly smug, something Billy would almost certainly chide him for. He squints slightly and forces his mind away from Billy. It doesn't matter anymore what Billy would or would not do; that had been made clear enough the last time Lando had seen Billy, and dwelling on it (him) like this was just pointless and stupid.

"What's his name?" moustache asks, sounding as though he's interested in spite of himself. His hands are twiddling idly with a battered deck in a way that lacks showmanship, but demonstrates a certain competence and comfort with the cards, nevertheless.

"Don't recall his last name," scar-face says. "Mebbe I jus' never did hear it. But 'is first name's 'Lando' or somethin' like it.

Scar-face leans over and spits again, and Lando recovers a match and drags it across the tabletop, evoking the heavy, pungent odor of sulphur and a bright, briefly-blue flame. He lights his smoke and ponders how he feels about these boys knowing his name, talking about him in the saloon, bandying about rumors concerning him and Bills (which, if he's totally honest, make him plenty uncomfortable, and never mind that he'd done what he could to make them more than merely idle gossip). He's even less enthused about what this does to his prospects in a town like this one; it seems hardly fair. A bloke's reputation -- earned, as Lando's has been, by a good deal of honest card-playing -- ought to help him at least as much as it hinders him, and that sure doesn't seem likely to be the case here.

This being the first time he's ever heard his own name come up just makes it seem all the more unfair.

"Clancy tol' me," scar-face says after a long pause, several minutes at least, "that he was nervous the whole time he played that kid."

"Was he?" moustache asks curiously. "What for?"

Scar-face shakes his head. "He said he didn't rightly know. Some of it prob'ly was Boyd bein' there, watchin' and standin' still the way he does. You know what I mean." It's not a question, but moustache is nodding anyway; Lando turns for a second to look straight at the pair of them, curious, and sees identical looks of discomfort on their faces, the kind of look a bloke gets when he knows something isn't right, but can't figure out just what it is that's nagging at him. "Dean even said that was some of it, he was pretty sure, but he said the kid just made him nervous. Like there was something about him that got 'is hackles up, and he didn't know what the hell it was."

Several minutes go by in silence. Lando crushes his smoke out on the sole of his boot.

"Clancy talks a lot," moustache finally says, but he doesn't sound like he necessarily doesn't believe it.

"Yeah," scar-face agrees (and spits), but his tone also suggests that he's not entirely willing to just dismiss it as talk.

Shit, Lando thinks.

Bugger it.

He isn't strapped, not yet; he's holding comfortably, for just himself. Nowhere near as comfortably as Billy liked to -- Lando hasn't hit that comfort level yet, or that ability level, for that matter -- but it doesn't take as much to get Lando by.

But today is a wash. Now is the time to fold, and Lando tosses back what's left in his glass and shoves his chair away from the table.

He has learned that knowing when to leave the table isn't always the hardest thing; sometimes it's convincing yourself to do it, even when you know it's for the best.

He's only taken a half dozen steps when he's dismayed to hear scar-face call after him.

"Hey, mister?"

Lando turns toward the pair of them (just in time to see scar-face spit, oh joy), and moustache gives him a nod and a friendly enough grin to occupy him while his hygienically challenged friend wipes his chin with the back of his hand (yet again). Lando cocks his head inquiringly; eventually scar-face gestures to an empty chair at their table and inclines his head toward it. "You play poker, mister?"

Every chance I get, Lando thinks. It's his standard answer to that question, along with a grin.

And it won't do in this situation, won't do at all. An affirmative will lead to an invitation, which will lead to introductions, and though they do not yet know it, they already know his name.

But…

But he wants to play. He always wants to play (although there had been a few false starts, just after Helena; a handful of times that he sat down at the table and was suddenly and helplessly aware of the lack of Billy's presence, which ended with him excusing himself before the first hand was even dealt), and that's one of the constants in Lando's life. He recognizes it as what he is, rather than just what he does, and he wonders that Billy never told him that, along with the dozens of other little tidbits of wisdom he'd imparted on a weekly basis.

Maybe it was one of those things that Billy thought Lando should have just known; Lando suspects now that there had been lots of those things. Things like Billy's affinity for blokes rather than ladies (as though he could have missed noticing, after that time in Mexico City and Billy's swollen lips and the French actor with his trousers unbuttoned); Lando guesses he was supposed to know, but not care about that, and certainly he wasn't supposed to come to feel that it might be possible, it might be good, there could be more…

"You all right, mister?" scar-face asks, his voice slightly less friendly now, and Lando realizes he's just been standing there looking at the bloke for several seconds.

He doesn't think about it, doesn't plan on it; it just happens.

"Pardonez-moi, s'il vous plait," he says, and shrugs. "My English… lapses on occasion, Monsieur. I did not intend to be rude."

Scar-face's expression clears, and he smiles; Lando sees that the side of his mouth that is scarred curls up a bit higher than the other side. "That's a'right," scar-face says, and holds up a deck of cards. "Pull up a chair, stranger. If you don't play, me and Jim'll teach ya."

Lando smiles and nods and sits down, his mind moving a million miles an hour as he arranges what needs doing in his head.

\--

Lying in his rented room with several of Jim McCullough and Jamie Madsen's dollar bills thickening his wallet, he thinks he probably should have just given them a different name. Now that he isn't actually trying to, he can come up with a handy dozen general monikers, things that would have done him just fine.

He doesn't know exactly why he had done it that way.

He speaks French, of course; one of any number of subjects that hadn't been taught at the little school attended by the rancher's children, but that his mother had insisted fiercely that any educated young man had to learn. But he hasn't really used it in years. His French is nowhere near perfect, though it had done well enough for Jim and Jamie. He speaks Spanish more fluently, actually, and can read Latin and a bit of German. His mum is a fan of education in general, and languages, specifically.

She comes from a long line of educated men and women, and even as a kid, Lando understood her insistence that he be as well educated as possible, America or not. It was one of the few things Lando ever saw her argue with his stepfather about.

He had been of the opinion that Lando's time would be better spent doing chores around the ranch, the stupid bastard.

He'd introduced himself as Julien -- it had been the only French sounding name he could think of on short notice that wasn't Jean-something, as he speaks French, but he's never actually met a French person (the actor, his mind stubbornly insists, does not count) -- and they hadn't asked for a last name, which was just as well.

He'll have to get one together by tomorrow evening, though, as he's got a handful of games lined up, and he doesn't intend to miss them. He's got a limited amount of time to operate under this assumed name, he understands, before there will be questions he doesn't know the answers to, and as liars go, Lando isn't what you'd call experienced.

The best way to lie, Billy told him (one of the interminable lessons that Bills had absolutely insisted on, in spite of Lando's reticence, claiming that Lando would be glad to have the knowledge some day, and what do you know, Billy's proved right once again), was to stick as close to the truth as possible. The less you have to remember to pull off a lie, the better off you are.

La Fleur, Lando thinks, idly running one hand down his chest to scratch at his belly. It's not a literal translation of his last name, but it's close enough that Lando's not likely to forget it.

There will be other things, of course. When you lie, there always are. Things always come up that you hadn't thought of, and it's one of the things Lando's always hated about lying deliberately, that constant understanding that there's bound to be something you can't explain or hadn't thought to take into consideration.

But he's started it now, and there's nothing to be done but move forward with it, at least until he leaves Callahan City. Then, if need be, he can rethink it, can dismiss Julien La Fleur as a one-time happening. It isn't as though Lando's going to be forced to keep up this persona once he moves on (which is a good thing, because he speaks French -- and reads it, the latter quite a bit more proficiently than the former -- but not fluently enough to fool an actual native-speaker, and while there aren't a lot of frogs in these parts, if he carries on the charade - ha! - long enough, he's bound to run into one); Lando can keep this up, he decides, at least for a little while.

Once he gets away from Texas, no one is likely to know Lando's name anyway, he thinks as he drifts quietly into sleep.

 

 

[ ](http://smg.photobucket.com/albums/v97/jen_catt/west/?action=view&current=rumpledjuliencropped-1.jpg)


	6. The Devil's Covenants: Billy, Hugo, in Hell, 1876

The sounds snuff out, cell by cell, and that's how he knows they're coming.

His body shudders upward in its crouch, a black flicker that jars him back from where he's been. It's night outside, still hours from dawn; he's at the knothole. The haggard moon drifted by not long ago, and his body has crept along the wall to follow its progress.

It's been a while since they've done this, come in the night for him. At first, they could take him unawares sometimes, but not anymore. The unsounds announce them, long before they're close enough for smaller, human sounds to do it. They can't drag him from sleep now, because he no longer sleeps. Or maybe he's sleeping all the time, and he's taken through this in dreaming, and his mind no longer wakes to follow it. Or maybe he's dead. If he thinks about it, he can't find any difference.

When he thinks.

He presses his shoulder into the rough boards and waits for the muffled clanks and footsteps that will tell him that it's time to move. Not that it matters to them where they find him. If he's standing, they knock him to the ground before they drag him out. If he's down already, they yank him to his feet before throwing him down again outside the door. It doesn't make a difference to him either--he's learned to be gone before they take him out the door. They're not clever men, but what they do (and don't) whispers that they've got their orders. They never come in less than threes, always with one watching with whip or stick in hand. But never with a gun. No guns. No blows where they'll cause deep bleeding. No injuries that'd draw infection and offer a sooner death through rot. No escape, by any means. Each time, he leaves just enough of himself behind that they think he's still there, so they won't be spurred onward by non-response. Afterwards, he can stitch together what happened from the marks and bruises, from the rawness of his throat, from the pain. When the Marshall's been there, he finds a certain ... artistic turn. (Not from the marks themselves, though; in the early days, when he couldn't get away, he learned that what Urban wanted was to watch.)

Mostly, he leaves the pieces sundered. Tries not to look or move, just waits within himself while his body makes its repairs. But sometimes, his mind will start whispering. How they found him. Who told them. Whose hand was on the reins. And then everything starts, the noise building, and he can feel every burn and welt and broken bone they've given him flaring like a brand under his skin, the ones they haven't left yet, the ones they didn't do. Other touches, from before; those hateful and those he thought not. They spark and batter against him until it all forces its way out, and when he finds his way back to himself, there are coals where his voice used to be, and new marks that weren't there before.

They come for him less often, but they still come. He knows they'll never let him go, and they'll never kill him. This cell is four splintered walls, a floor. In the day, the heat is suffocating. But at night, he can stare out the knothole until his eyes go dry, until the grain of the boards against his skin makes his flesh melt away and he dissolves into the darkness, into nothing. For months he nursed himself on hatred and venom, visions of revenge, until he nearly killed himself battering the walls. There are whole territories in himself that he's burned bare and salted; in this spot, he can cast the rest aside. He will not leave this windowless room until age creeps in to steal him away. But if they catch him at the knothole, they could move him somewhere else, deeper inside the compound, and that is the only thought he cannot bear.

The first soft footfall insinuates itself under the door, and he steals one last look at the night sky before pushing himself to standing. His hands shake like pebbles telegraphing a coming stampede. He can't stop them anymore. He goes inside and starts disconnecting things, unyoking mind from body so that when they jerk him out the door he'll be thrown free. The shaking worsens as he goes; there's less and less left to hold him together.

He's unhitching the last rope, loosening the last cord, when the sounds grow close enough that he hears. It yanks him back to himself, sends him flying across the room to flatten against the wall behind the door, heart hammering.

There's only one set of footsteps. Only one.

His hands clench and then spring open, waiting. A scrap of instinct pulls him onto the balls of his feet and plants one arm against the wall, ready to launch him forward. He won't make it out of the building. There are men at every door. But he can take this one down, get into the hallway, and then he just has to start running. They'll shoot when they see him. There's more than one kind of escape. The footsteps come closer, and the taste of blood floods his mouth. His fingers can feel the give of a windpipe as it snaps. A key slides home and the tumblers turn, winding him tighter until he's ready to spring. In the last sane scraps of his mind, he know the face he's seeing won't be the one that walks through the door, but it'll have to do.

"Boyd."

It's quiet, the sound just a shadow of itself, but it jerks him still. He's been here a long time--long enough to run a lifetime backwards, to strip the varnish and screws from him and pull the pieces apart, long enough that every voice in these walls is as distinct as a face, as a scar. This is not a voice he knows. And more importantly, this is not a name that's used here. Urban likes to calls him William. The men don't call him anything at all. There's another voice, another name sometimes, but it's as much ghost as he is. He has not heard this name in years. He doesn't answer, but he's listening.

There's a long pause. He can hear the brush of fabric on leather, the slight shift of a bootheel. "I know you're in there, Boyd," the voice says. "I can get you out. So when I open this door, you're going to be standing in the middle of the room, nice and quiet, with your hands where I can see them. Otherwise, I'll blow this whole cell full of holes and save myself some effort. You hear me?"

He hears--at a distance, because the sense of the words is trickling into the black in his head, casting a faint glow on the debris and sending the dust to dancing. Not much light, but enough to let him dig out the old scales and judge that either option far outweighs the ones he's had up till now. If he plays this right, it's freedom either way (just the thought rings through him like a bell), and the opener is the same. It takes a second to find the pieces he needs, to cobble himself together into the shape of a man. "I hear you," he whispers.

Billy steps into the center of the room.

Hugo uses his left hand to push the door. The hinges are sluggish and the door is heavy; it doesn't swing. He's forced to take a half-step forward and push again to keep it going. That puts him one foot over the threshold. He raises the gun in his right hand, shoulder-high at arm's length.

It's dark inside, the lantern that's hanging someway further back down the passage throwing only the slightest relief of yellow and ochre into the black.

The smell hits him first--old dirt and excrement, somehow drier and thinner and more horrifying than the fat fresh stink that Hugo takes for granted in a prison. Then he sees Boyd--Boyd's eyes--and for a raw second Hugo's stomach sours and he can almost hear Sean

kill it, kill it now before it tries to kill you. Show it some mercy and kill it

Hugo fumbles behind his back with his left hand, unhooking the handcuffs there. He throws them--low, underhand, almost gentle--into the dirt a few feet in front of Boyd's bare, bloodied feet.

"Put them on," Hugo says.

Boyd looks down, looks up again, his face stiff and expressionless. The seconds spin out, silent and somehow too still.

"I said, put them on," Hugo repeats.

Boyd blinks, a bizarrely slow flick of his eyelids.

Hugo's stomach turns over. As his eyes grow more accustomed to the gloom, he can make out more and more of the marks on Boyd's skin, the places where it's darkened with bruises or glossy with fresh wounds. The thing he's worked so hard not to see in Karl's eyes--to hear in Karl's nightmares--is suddenly, literally, standing in front of him in all its gruesome reality.

kill it.

No. Killing Boyd isn't going to stop this. Killing him isn't enough. He needs to be more than dead. He needs to be gone, vanished like a scrap of dream at daybreak, gone as if he'd never existed. Hugo's quite capable of ensuring the corpse would never be found, and he'd feel a sight more comfortable traveling with the corpse than with the living man, but he's not so far gone that he's willing to kill Boyd merely for his own convenience. He's willing to get Boyd away and free, if he can.

"Can you--can you talk?" Hugo forces himself to ask.

His thumb presses a little harder of the revolver's hammer.

Boyd doesn't answer. Something eases in Hugo's chest. He's not mute, he's just--

Hugo eases the gun down to his side.

"I'm going to take you out of here. I'm not going to hurt you--unless you try to hurt me. I've got a pack-mule with food and water and clothes, and a decent saddle-horse. I'll ride with you until morning, point you to the next water-hole, and you're free."

He lets that sit on the air for a moment. Then he moves forward--slowly again, and purposely keeping his posture relaxed. He leans in slightly and uses the side of his boot to scrape the handcuffs back towards him, and then crouches--never taking his eyes off Boyd's face--finds them by touch, and picks them up again.

"There's a guard at the gate," he says. "He won't know you--won't know--who you are. But he knows enough to know I wouldn't take any prisoner out of here without even a rope on him. So you're gonna have these on. Do you understand?"

He doesn't, not at all; there's no reason for a lawman to do what this one says he's doing. But sense isn't Billy's north star anymore, and right now reason matters as little as if it were on the far side of the earth. Trick, trap, he doesn't care, and he understands enough to know that time wasted on questions is time for this small window to slam shut.

The cuffs, though: just the light on the metal ties his guts in knots, turns his bones to brittle sticks left too close to the fire. He looks at them and doesn't move; won't do to start shaking, won't do to look crazy or dangerous, won't do to get left in this cell. Forces himself to breathe past the crushing weight. When he's reined his body in, he lifts his head up and meets the man's eyes. "Keep them loose," he tells him.

The man's eyebrows go winging up when Billy speaks, but he stays that kind of still you goes when your animal side's telling you to shoot and be done with it. "How do I know you won't get foolish?"

They're trading risks. He used to be good at this, in some other life; there's no knowing if he still is. "Get shot if I do." The man's face shows agreement, but he doesn't move. Something else. Billy casts about for it. "How do I know you'll do what you said?"

Sheer guess, and he doesn't even care what the answer is. Must not show, though, because the man says, serious enough, "Because I said I'll do it."

There's no reason any man's word is worth a thing, except that every man who's come at Billy through this door knows his word is worth so little that he'd never bother to offer it. If this man is a snake, he's still a different breed than the wolves who run this place, and right now Billy will take Lucifer himself over the devil he knows. He moves his hands to the front of his body, fisted tight to thicken his wrists. "So will I," he says, the words strange in his mouth like a foreign tongue. "Keep them loose."

Time slips by and Billy's hands start wanting to tremble under the passage of it but he keeps them steady. When the man eases forward, his eyes stay on Billy's face as his hand works the cuffs. It shows experience--Billy half-remembers that he used to do the same--but he doesn't think his face will tell the man anything. His stone has crumbled and iron corroded; time locked in his body's cage has made him all flesh or none of it, and any part may either betray him or hang there like it belongs to someone else. The first touch of the metal sets loose a wild bolt of fear through him; he jerks wildly but manages to keep both wrists still so the chain won't clink. The man jerks in surprise, but his hand (and his gun) stay steady too until the second cuff clicks tight and he pulls smoothly out of reach. Billy stares at the oily corrupted shine of the things wrapped around his wrists, and he twists one hand a little to test. Man of his word, indeed--space enough that he could scrape out and not leave too much skin behind. Enough chain to circle a man's neck, too. He tamps the thought down before it has a change to show. He lets his hands fall in front of him, turned a little to cover the slack, and nods. The man moves silently out from in front of the doorway and gestures with the barrel of his gun. This time it's Billy who lets the seconds flow free, lets the air of the cell settle and ossify around him, seeing every board, every crack and crevice like they're painted on the inside of his skull. Closes his eyes and checks for the knothole, just to make sure it's there. Then he moves forward and through the door.

Hugo steps out after him, gun leveled at his back.

"Keep walking," Hugo says softly.

Boyd does, shuffling slowly, his head down and his shoulders rounded as if expecting a blow. Hugo pulls the cell door to behind himself, twists the key in the lock and pulls it free. He follows Boyd down the hallway, keeping his gun leveled at Boyd's back.

The prisoners in the other cells watch silently. One or two make soft sounds of commiseration, but most just stare. Hugo keeps his head tilted slightly, his face shadowed by the brim of his hat. He's not a remarkable man in face or frame, there's nothing about him that can be used to identify him from the mass of men ... not when his marshal's badge is safely tucked down into his right boot. And besides, it would take strong evidence indeed to make Karl believe Hugo has betrayed him.

Betrayed. Or. Saved.

They come out of the hallway into the open room where the guards sit and while away the hours with cards or drink or, on a few memorable occasions, with girls from the nearest town. The place is deserted, except for a single man sprawled on his back on the floor.

"Stop," Hugo says.

Boyd stops, staring down at the corpse with its chest soaked black with blood.

Hugo moves sidewise, keeping his eye on Boyd while he hunkers down next to the body. He hooks the key in his hand back onto the ring hanging on the dead man's belt. Boyd watches, his pale green eyes half-hooded.

"Go," Hugo says, straightening up again.

Boyd moves again, as supple and obedient as a dog. Hugo doesn't feel reassured--far from it. More resistance would mean more confusion, more uncertainty. Boyd's silent and swift obedience suggests that he's already calculating odds, and he realizes that Hugo's his best bet ... for the next few minutes, at least.

Boyd halts just inside the heavy wooden doors of the guards' room. Hugo reaches past him, shoves the right hand door open.

"Keep going."

Boyd hesitates, but only a beat. He steps out into the open air.

The sky is velvet black and thickly scattered with stars from horizon to horizon. The moon is just past the zenith, more than crescent and less than first-quarter full, but without a cloud in the sky there's enough light to see by. There are two saddle horses tied to the rail next to the gate, one with saddle-bags and a bedroll, the other with only its saddle, and a hefty mule with a decent pile of gear arranged on each side.

"Go," Hugo says again.

They walk across the gritty dirt square of the courtyard. There's a single guard standing under the gateway. He assumes a slightly less slouched posture.

"That's the one, eh?" he says loudly.

"Yeah," Hugo answers, without looking in his direction.

He gestures Boyd to the side of the saddle horse and holds the stirrup, since the cuffs mean Boyd has to put both hands to the saddle-horn.

"Get up," Hugo says.

Boyd's already doing it, hauling his weight up with too much effort. He settles himself in the saddle as if unsure of his seat. Hugo tugs the reins free from the hitching rail, and keeps them in his hand as he swings up onto his own horse and twitches the packmule's halter-rope loose too.

"Open the gates," he says, jerking his chin at the guard.

The guard smirks, and shoulders away from his place. He lifts the wooden bar and shoves one leaf of the double gate open.

Hugo slips a gold eagle from his coat pocket and tosses it to the guard.

"Get out of here," Hugo calls as he kicks his horse into a canter, his grip on the reins bringing Boyd's horse and the mule with him.

"There's nothing here but the devil," the guard shouts back.

Hugo takes them around the slight curve of the road, and then down the steep escarpment, through gray scrub-brush. As soon as they hit the flat--the smooth gray-sand plain that stretches all the way to the hills in the west --Hugo digs his heels into his horse's sides again.

"Come on," he shouts, glancing back at Boyd. "We won't have moonlight for long."

Afterwards, Billy can never find the route they take. Landmarks, terrain, how long they ride for--he loses all of it to the great gaping maw of the night above him and the living body of the horse underneath him. The innumerable stars wheeling en masse as he hasn't seen them for years, over a horizon so wide that any moment he feels he will ride over the edge of it and into the sky itself. He hunkers low and clings to the saddlehorn with his chained hands, not sure if he's trying to keep from falling or hasten their pursuit of the world's ragged edge, and not caring either way. After a crushing mountain of time trapped like an insect in sap, motion smears the rest of the ride from him.

He does remember wind, battering in a rush of air against him, and years later he will reassure himself that though he cannot remember the way back, the night's rough hand made sure that no one will be able to trace it forward to him.

They stop when dawn hooks her fingertips over the hills ahead of them, the man guiding the horses to rest at the edge of a feeble creek. Billy keeps himself still and easy in the saddle as his mount drinks; he came back to himself a few miles ago as the night wore thin and gray, and he's had the time to turn a few things over and see the shape they form. He still doesn't know the man's purpose in taking him out. To ride a prisoner this far out to kill him makes no sense--they've passed a thousand places that could have hidden his flesh and bones--but there aren't any other pegs that fit this hole. There's no coin in speculating. Whatever happens is going to happen now.

Not dismounting, the man loops the reins of Billy's horse around a stout branch and turns away to unknot the mule's lead-rope so he can do the same. Quietly as he can, Billy shifts his feet back in the stirrups so they're braced against the footplate, all but his toes free. No way to get a grip on the cuffs' chain without sending it ringing, but he's got as much slack as he can. If he has to move with the chain loose, the cuffs'll cut his forearms when he yanks down, but they probably won't snap his bones. He draws himself up a little, thighs tense and ready. It won't be hard, won't be hard at all, and then he can start over from this point with no one who can draw a line back to where he's been. The mule is complaining at the tug of the rope, and the man hisses as he pulls back and knots the rope more securely. He's bent at the waist and leaning far out over the saddle. All Billy has to do is jump now, and he can have the chain around the man's neck while the man is still fighting to keep his seat. If they go over the far side of the horse, it's Billy who'll come down on top and the man's arms will be pinned beneath the both of them. Strip the body and leave it, take the goods, sell one of the horses and he's got it made. It'll be easy.

He doesn't know why he's not moving.

Lead-rope secure, the man turns his horse so that he's facing Billy. He reaches down under his coat and the first shot takes Billy in the shoulder, second in the throat, the third to the chest is the one that finally knocks him off the sadly to land rag-doll limp in the sand, vision smeared out in the red of his own blood and finally, God, finally only that isn't how it happens because what the man pulls out is a key and he reaches over and takes the cuffs off Billy's hands. Billy stares at him and touches one wrist reflexively, its only circles the vast miles of empty air and his own hand.

"There's a town about fifteen miles east of here, and a rail depot about twenty-five to the north," the man says. "I'm riding back the way we came, and I'd advise you not to follow." He looks a question at Billy, and when it goes unanswered, he nods once and flicks the reins. Their legs don't quite brush as the man's horse walks by, and it goes another half-dozen paces before Billy manages to turn under the weight of all that open space.

"I'll owe you a favor one day," he calls, and the man reins his horse in, turns to look at him. Wreck that he is, Billy holds steady. He is bound by law no more, but as long as he draws breath there will be other ties, and it's best he puts word to them. Far more is going unsaid, because Billy's mind may be a broken thing, but he knows no man not part of Urban's law could've found his way to Urban's prison, and no man under Urban's thumb would've defied his word. The man in front of him wears no star. Its absence makes no difference. "Send word when you're ready to collect."

Things chase each other back and forth across the man's face. After a long minute he nods and spurs his horse sharply and they gallop west with the rising sun at their heels. Billy watches until the last dust settles and then swings awkwardly down out of the saddle. He takes a few steps forward and strips the prisoner's rags from his body, dropping them in a heap before dropping to his knees in the creekbed and falling face down in the cold water. He presses his face into the dark sand until his lungs are bursting, then he rolls onto his back and draws in long gasps of air as color bleeds into the sky above him and the water washes past. When the blue reaches as far as he can see and his body is scoured and numbed by cold, he climbs to his feet and goes to the packmule. Clothes and boots as promised, even a hankerchief that Billy rips to cotton strips to bind his cracked and bleeding feet. He lets the horse and mule drink their fill and fills the canteen he finds with creekwater. There's room in the saddlebags for his ruined scraps of clothing, but his few fragments of sense cannot bring him to touch them. He leaves them in a heap on the rocks and tosses a lit match onto them as he kicks the horse and mule into motion. The long-absent sun's touch is harsh and he welcomes it.

He rides south, and as his mind and vision blur into an empty red, Billy dreams of another favor that needs returning.


	7. Balances: Lando, Billy, Yuma, 1876

There are sounds coming through the rough pine door -- murmurs, rustles, a tittering giggle that batters at Billy's ears like moth wings. This is a whorehouse. He's ghosted through several these past weeks, buying drinks, bribing bartenders, sometimes threatening the girls. This is the right one. He's known it since before he bought the kitchenhand's description ( _"tall, dark eyes, fast and pretty with his hands"_ ); he's known it since he walked up the stairs and into the building. When you hunt for something this intently, impossible not to know that you've found it. He can feel Lando twitching in his bones. The words he hears are strange -- French, perhaps, it's been forever since he's heard it, but the thrum of that voice is dead on, and he wouldn't put it past Lando to have picked up the language. He was always deft with pretty things.

The revolver's ivory is cold under his hand. He's had the gun a month now, but it hasn't warmed to him yet. Whenever he tries to remember where he got it, his mind turns a corner and he finds he's traveled a few more yards without seeing. He knows why he got it though, and he wonders if after tonight it will lose its chill.

A gun always likes you better once it knows its purpose.

His hands are cool and dry and right now, they aren't shaking. He can feel the power in them, the iron in his spine. Everything snaps suddenly clear and lucid, as though every moment of the last two years bordered directly against this one. As if each moment he survived by clinging to this purpose has lead him directly here. Express train, no stops, no waiting. The bleak and hideous country flying by without a single pause for fuel. The giggle inside falls to a muffled gasp, and his fingers gently twist the doorknob and send him through to the inside.

Lando has been living hard and wary for a long time now. Days that bled into months and then years of being alone and responsible for himself, responsible for his life, have taught him tricks he never had to know living on a ranch or learning to be a gambler.

It isn't a sound that makes him look up, see the knob of the door turning. He doesn't know what it is, precisely, and he doesn't question it. He twists and pushes Myra off of him (she yelps once, soft) and shoves her hard toward the wall. There is a gap between bed and wall, less than a foot wide, and he jams her into it bed sheets and all, and hears her muffled and indignant caw with something that would be amusement if he had more time for it. His left hand snags a knife from his belt, slung carefully close over the bedpost, and he turns toward the door, naked feet connecting with the carpet on the floor even as it swings open. The knife is curled carefully in his left hand, held by the blade, concealed by the turn of his body, and half behind one thigh.

Shadows are thick in the room and in the corridor outside; he can't see the face of the man who enters, but that hardly matters. Lando recognizes the shadowy profile, not the face, with a shock that scalds his mind white for a moment. His fingers loosen around the knife blade, and then tighten again.

Myra is a good girl, a smart girl; she isn't making a sound.

Lando hears himself stop breathing as he feels his entire body tighten and tense at the shock seeing him again, seeing him here. The irony of the situation isn't lost on him, either, their vulnerability reversed; irony is something he had never fully appreciated before he'd met Billy.

Then the door is fully open and the light from the hall that's throwing Billy's shadow onto the wall where Lando can identify it wavers and shifts at the draft. Billy steps into the room, two slow and purposeful strides, and suddenly the moonlight from outside is on Billy's face, bathing it in cold silver light, purging it of shadow.

"Bills," Lando breathes, barely a sound, and just looks. The knife in his left hand is almost forgotten and it's his right hand, his smart hand, that drifts forward a little, palm up, open in some sort of curious, questioning gesture the meaning of which Lando does not know. He cannot interpret what he is feeling; it's too quick(bright) and ephemeral(hope), there only for a moment, only until Billy's face moves into the light.

Then it's gone because Billy's face doesn't encourage any emotion at all except for sharp and wary caution. Billy's face harbors nothing, empty and still, and Lando's fingers tighten again on the blade in his left hand, feeling the razor edge of it, the weight. He is glad for his right hand suddenly, glad it has risen like that, created something non-threatening for Bills to see. Perhaps he won't think of Lando's left hand, drawn into the shadows behind his naked thigh.

When he knew Billy (and when Billy knew Lando, and not Julien, Billy had never known Julien), Lando had not yet learned to use his left hand with any skill, and knives are one of the few things that Bills never taught him.

The smart thing to do -- the thing Bills would likely tell him to do -- would be to use the advantage at once, before he loses it, but Lando doesn't. He waits, and watches Billy's face.

The mask of calm that hides Billy's thoughts from Lando doesn't so much as twitch, and Lando knows it. He's seen it before.

It's Billy's card playing-face.

It's also Billy's killing face.

Lando speaks the name, the old one, and there's a ripple and lurch in Billy's head, like the whorehouse is a riverboat and they've just been pulled into an eddy of, not water, but time. For a moment, it's like that night two years ago rerouting itself, but with everything backwards and shifted. Now it is Billy coming back into the room, instead of Lando, who never did. Instead of the flare of denied want between them, there is the bright and trivial hum of the sex that Billy has (again, isn't it? because he did it that time, too) interrupted. Now it is Lando naked, as Billy almost was last time, and now instead of words, Billy is armed with a revolver, like the one that Lando didn't use.

And Lando has a weapon too, one that Billy can't see, but its unseen-ness (in the tilt and poise of Lando's body, the focus in his face) rings sharp inside his head.

Lando says again, "Bills," the final sibilant rising like smoke in the air between them, and Billy breathes the smoke in and feeds it a question. "What do you have there, Lando?" His voice sounds hollow and rough around the edges; he can hear it echo.

Carefully, eyes never moving towards the gun at Billy's side ( _clever, that's right_ , whispers the part of him that used to play poker), Lando floats his left arm out from behind his back and shows Billy the lamplight on the polished blade. His limbs are sleeker now and less ropy, hair longer and better cut, but it is the lack of excess motion that catches Billy's eye. Lando does not vibrate, or tense his shoulders, or let his fingers twitch; does not do any of the things that used to telegraph his intentions bell-clear. His eyes are soft and brown and guilelessly blank. His left hand looks as steady as his right. This new stillness is familiar somehow, but Billy does not know from what.

Lando has a weapon, a knife he has not thrown at Billy, which he has presented for the asking like an obedient child with a copper-banded snake. And Billy does not know the knife's purpose, but he knows the rules of weapons, and he orders, "Put the knife down, Lando."

Lando stares at him and does not move, so he repeats it, quieter and more sharply: "I said, put the knife down."

Lando considers it for several more seconds, mostly for the time it allows him to look Billy over, take in everything from his worn, sprung boots to the single pistol (and Lando finds the singularity of the gun to be ominous, though he can't think why) on his right hip. Billy's fingers are curled around the butt of the gun. It isn't either of the pistols that Lando would have recognized, at one time, as Billy's.

Billy's voice is recognizably his, though it's rougher than Lando remembers it being, almost frayed-sounding, and he is too thin, his face a drawn mask. He is so still as to be unnerving; it was something of Billy's trademark, that ability to be still, and Lando remembers it well, but this... this is something different. Something about his eyes isn't right, but it's dark and Lando's not sure what he's seeing.

 _What happened?_ he wants to ask, _God, what happened to you, Bills?_ and it's only long and deliberate months of training himself not to speak _especially_ when he most wants to that lets him bite the words back. They roll in his belly, coupled with some kind of sinking, dismal sensation that Lando can't quite identify.

Instead of asking, he turns slowly, carefully angling his throw away from Billy. It wouldn't do to provoke him, and Lando senses, can _smell_ the waiting in the air, the potential for bloodshed. He tosses it, a short, elegant move with just enough force behind it to sink the tip into the wood of the bedside table far enough to keep the hilt angled upward, so Lando has a fair shot at getting to it if he needs it.

Lando hears the hiss of metal on leather at the same time that he sees the gun come out and up, and the sound, the loud, death-on-the-air sound of the gun being cocked makes goose bumps spring up over every inch of his skin; he also sees the spasm that crosses Billy's face. It looks like sheer, mindless panic to Lando, and his mouth goes dry and dusty with fear. He stands still, hands open and empty at his sides, palms toward Billy, and is abruptly glad not to have the knife anymore.

Lando wants it in his hand too much to have it there. His palm is itching for the weight of it, comforting and lethal. His hand wants the knife, and that is exactly why Lando doesn't want it. It would be too easy, holding it, having it. It would be too easy to use it, as his hands do now, without thought, and if he'd had it in his hand when Bills moved, Bills would be dead now. There is no room for doubt.

Even looking down the barrel of Billy's iron, something like relief floods warmly into Lando's chest. It's ... reassuring, somehow, to know that in spite of the look on Billy's face (which Lando can still read clearly, regardless of Billy's eyes, which still don't seem quite right to Lando, almost like Bills isn't entirely present, like he is only nominally aware of Lando standing here in front of him in spite of what the speed of his draw seems to suggest) that says Billy is here for dark purposes, deadly purposes, Lando doesn't want to use his knives on Billy.

"Why are you here, Billy?" Lando says, keeping his voice low and still and empty, not allowing himself the familiar nickname. This man is not familiar. This man is deadly and foreign, and Lando dare not be comfortable with him, dare not _want_ to be comfortable with him.

Billy doesn't answer, but his eyes flicker at a tiny whimper from Myra, still presumably secreted between bed and wall, and the gun wavers in his hand. He's never seen Billy look like this; he wouldn't have believed Billy capable of this kind of skittering, wire-tight nerves, unbound by his ever-present restraint, his essential _control_.

Chills travel over Lando's exposed skin, and he has the insane urge to reach out a hand and lay it on Billy's arm, draw Billy's attention back to him, away from the distraction that is Myra, before something -- he isn't quite sure yet -- terrible happens.

He doesn't, of course, it would be bloody suicidal, but perhaps the thought is enough. Billy's eyes come back to Lando, flicker down ever-so-briefly, and Lando forgets about Billy's nerves instantly, unable to squash the swell of bitter amusement that seeing the flickering perusal evokes, because Bills almost (but not quite) wanting Lando is what had started all of this trouble to begin with, now isn't it? Ha.

The words are a low and sultry purr of sound, words like knives which he had once flatly refused to employ. He knows how to wield them now. His skills have been sharpened in this area, like so many others. They trip and roll off his tongue, Julien's words sharpened into razors with Lando's rage and hurt from old, unhealed wounds he can't ever seem to stop picking at.

"Come back to take me up on my offer, Bills?"

Lando's question stings and pierces like a snakebite, so sure and ready, the nickname like the clamp of jaw muscles that sends the venom flowing home. Billy's mind has never taken him beyond the door to this imagined room -- get out, find a weapon, find Lando, and then: death. Bright redblack obliteration of what sent him to where he's been. Never false details, panicked expression, the killing blow, and never, never any words. What he is seeking has no words that can match it. And now these words: acid and copper and arsenic, confident, taunting. And this smile: one he's never seen on Lando's face, one that, in his most hateful moments, he'd never imagined seeing there. Hard and bitter and meticulously cruel, like Lando's face has metal for bones and a knife for a tongue. Like he curls his lips by twisting the wires in his muscles tight.

It's the kind of smile that can't be faked -- it can be instinct or it can be made, but you can never wear it unless you had the makings for it all along. Unless your insides were always secretly the right shape. And Billy is still reeling from the blank that ate the moment the knife flew from Lando's hand, but this is proof. Proof.

Billy rocks a step forward, and something flickers across Lando's eyes, the smile slipping, but he doesn't stop to reread it before he takes another step, and then he launches himself across the room and his hands (gun still in his right, forgotten) close on Lando's throat. And snap tight.

Lando has never seen Billy charge anyone in his life. Never seen it, never expected to see it. Billy doesn't charge; he plans. Billy is calm and careful and meticulous.

Billy does not fly into rages, and he does not charge.

Thus he is nearly caught flat-footed when Billy does, in fact, charge. He gets his hands up, intending to deflect Bill's hands, but the pistol in Billy's right hand (which he seems to have forgotten, what the hell?) fetches sharply up against Lando's temple while Billy's left hand digs into Lando's neck, thumb jabbing deeply into the hollow of his throat. The blow sends him reeling backward a bit, which is the only thing that saves him from Billy's hands, determined to wrap around Lando's throat. Billy's left hand slips away, thumbnail digging a brightly painful furrow into Lando's neck that surely feels worse than it actually is.

 _What the hell...?_ Lando thinks again, but there really isn't time for anything beyond that, as Billy is shoving hard, pressing Lando backward, and he has to brace bare feet on the carpet, legs cocked, to retain his position.

"What the bloody hell is your problem, Bills?" Lando snarls through teeth clenched together with the effort of holding Billy back, his hands wrapped firmly around Billy's upper arms. He is trying to calculate the possibility of knocking Billy out (slim) or disarming him (even slimmer) or talking him down (nigh to bloody impossible) and keep grappling with him at the same time; words are nothing more than an attempt at distraction, and not one he thinks will actually work (although Lando won't complain if they do).

He is taller than Bills, maybe even stronger (probably stronger, actually), and there are a half dozen tricks he knows that might send Billy down to his ass, but Lando isn't quite willing to do that. He doesn't want to see Bills on his ass, looking up at Lando with dead, yet somehow _feral_ eyes, but that isn't the only reason.

If he is stupid enough to push Billy too hard, Lando is going to die tonight. He can see it, smell it, taste it on his tongue like he's holding his life between his teeth. Bills will kill him, and there isn't any doubt of it because Billy is willing to kill (Billy has always been willing to kill if the stakes are high enough, while Lando has yet to encounter stakes that high). And Lando... Lando is not.

But he doesn't want to die. Not yet.

He finds his left hand sliding down Billy's arm to curl tight around his right wrist, and Lando thinks he could get the gun, maybe. Billy is clearly not in his right mind. All the care and strategy that Lando _knows_ Billy is capable of (God, hadn't they spent enough time on it, the two of them cozy, even sitting just off the road with the whole world open around them and only the firelight providing the illusion of safety?) is gone, somehow, and what is in Billy's face is the cagey ferocity of a cornered animal, vicious and fierce, but not directed.

Billy isn't thinking (and Lando is frankly having a hard time believing a Billy who isn't _thinking_ is even possible); Billy is only existing (and that, from the look of Billy's thin, lined face and shadowed eyes, just barely) and Lando is capable of outmaneuvering any man that isn't using his brain.

He knows it.

But.

With Billy's hand wrapped around Lando's shoulder, fingertips digging in hard, there's no way to use the gun without killing Billy.

Like the knife, his hand wants it (his hand practically insists, in fact) but _Lando_ doesn't; he won't, because if he does the only way to use it is set it right up against Billy's body, and it is not a bloody cap pistol, it's a .45, and there is no way not to kill Bills if he presses the cold muzzle against his body and pulls the trigger.

"Just walk away," Lando hears himself whisper, and they are so close that there's no doubt that Billy can hear him. "Neither of us has to die tonight, Bills. Please. Just turn around and leave now, and we can both just forget..."

 

Lando's skin is fire, or maybe it's Billy's hands that are hot, but every touch between them skids and burns like rope. It's as though the contact is magnified a hundredfold, made too intense for his mind to capture, so that it only comes through in red-orange flashes of knuckles on collarbone, fingers biting arms. Weaving through that heat, the words come clear and liquid, with a poisonous tang. Not water ( _forget ..._ ), but kerosene.

He finds his body, limbs braced and twisting in a careless waste of energy that feels somehow foreign. There has been a blank in Billy's hand, a not-space that is suddenly the gun again, shoved awkward and useless against Lando's head. He uses a breath to coil his body tight, half-turns as he clamps his fingers tighter into the muscle and tendon of Lando's shoulder, and then whips around, gun barrel slamming across Lando's cheekbone as he whirls. Lando's head bounces off the wall with a loud crack, and Billy drives an elbow into his ribs before pushing himself sharply backward as Lando drops heavily to his knees. Panting, he stares at the red bloom bursting on Lando's cheek and lets the power surge through him, returning his focus.

Because Lando's wrong, of course.

One of them does have to die tonight.

 

Even through his suddenly skewed focus, Lando sees the gun coming up. His vision, momentarily tripled by the blow (pistol-whipped him, Bills just bloody _pistol-whipped_ him, and it hurt, it hurts goddammit, but the pain in his face and the pain in his ribs where Billy's elbow connected, is nothing to the white flash in his mind, the rage that is equal parts fear and hurt and the twisted, unwanted love that he's been carrying for so long now that he doesn't remember when it started, only remembers when it _ended_ ), goes stark and clear as soon as he understands what it is. He sways to one side without bothering to stand, as being a smaller target is better, all things considered. He's not as quick as he'd like to be (and he winces as something in his side flares, a kind of grating, scraping pain that he's certain isn't good), but it's quick enough to get him out of Billy's line of fire. He's excruciatingly aware of the knife behind him, within reach if he really wants it, but he doesn't go for it.

He can't.

Instead he swings a fist with conscious aim, and Billy really is bloody out of his mind; he doesn't even flinch, though he clearly sees it coming, and Lando's closed fist connects with Billy's forearm hard. Billy grunts, and his hand spasms open. A second blow, delivered as Lando clambers inelegantly to his feet, is enough to actually knock the gun away (and he sees Billy's fist from the corner of his vision, sees it coming); it clatters to the floor, a muffled thud on the carpet, and Lando takes the blow (it crashes into his ribs, smashes into him with a kind of shooting, spiraling wash of nauseating agony) because he can either dodge or kick the gun away, and the gun is far more certain to kill him than Billy's fists.

The gun skitters across the carpet (apparently it hurts like the dickens to kick a gun barefoot, who the hell would've guessed) and under the bedside table, and something, some certainty, some tension, loosens from around Lando's guts at the same time that Billy's second punch lands (to the ribs again, goddamn him to bloody hell). Billy's fist must be made of bloody lead, and this time Lando feels the crunch of breaking bones, and there is no doubt at all that Billy has no intention of stopping.

Lando staggers backward, two wind milling steps that cause bright flares of pain in his right side, and then catches himself one handed on the footboard of the bed, his fingers curling white-knuckled around the wood hard enough that he can feel the grain of the wood biting into the pads of his fingers. His left hand sneaks up to curl delicately around his side without his permission, and he winces at the jolt of pain, but he thinks it's bearable. For now, at least.

Billy is watching him, head cocked as though he's memorizing this, eyes narrowed into intent, observant slits, and Lando automatically stills himself, adjusts his face and his stance as much as he can manage (which doesn't include letting go of the bed -- it's the only thing keeping him on his feet -- or letting go of his side). "Why are you here, Bills?" he asks (again, and still without really expecting an answer), but the clearest thing in his mind has nothing to do with motive.

It has to do with distance.

The distance between himself and his knives; the distance between the knives and Bill Boyd.

Billy stares at Lando, who's swaying slightly despite his supporting grip. His face and ribs are swelling, blood creeping out of broken vessels just under the skin, and he imagines the internal topography of the familiar, unknown body. The muscle-wrapped bones, the tendons, arteries and internal organs snaking through the long-limbed frame. It's beautiful, it always was and will be, but when Billy looks at it now he imagines breaking and slicing and rending, laying it open and bare. There was a ranch-hand he worked with, a broad-faced, brown-skinned man who told him that far to the south, before the Europeans came, his ancestors used to examine the bodies of sacrifices to learn what the future might hold. It's the past that Billy's looking for, a broken thread he needs to follow so he can start again, and he finds himself wondering if he could find answers underneath that golden skin.

His head is clearer than it's been in months, and though his voice still sounds strange and iron-raw when he speaks, the words come remarkably easy. "You're slipping," he growls, and grimaces when Lando's eyes (at least the one that's not half-swollen) narrow. "Don't play stupid with me."

Lando doesn't really move, doesn't even blink, but Billy watches his free hand tense and recognizes, suddenly, that there's another knife in the belt on the bedpost. Whip-fast, he lunges forward and backhands Lando across the face, feeling the broken bone give slightly under the impact. Lando staggers and almost falls, only his grip on the footboard holding him upright, before swinging himself back up to glare at Billy, face twisted and rigid with pain and fury.

"I taught you better than that," Billy murmurs, rocking back so he's just out of reach. "Use your head. If you send a man to Hell, you'd better make sure he's never coming out again, because when he does, he's going to want a piece of his own."

Confusion swims through Lando's eyes, and for a moment Billy wonders what he's been doing for the last two years -- opium, whiskey, whores -- to make him lose his edge this badly. The Lando he knew was quick as a match, and there's no way that Lando wouldn't have known what Billy was talking about, or that Billy would come for him. Maybe they've both been changed.

That isn't going to save him.

"Two years," he spits flatly. "I lost two years for your little stunt. What do you think I'm going to do to you to take them back?"

 _Two years?_

"Stunt?" Lando repeats, half-question, and even to his own ears his voice sounds like the word is totally foreign, outside of his vocabulary. He can't get a sense of it, can't see how it connects to _this_. It's such a harmless sounding word, after all.

And it isn't as though Lando's life the last two years has been some sort of spectacular pleasure tour of the continent. Anger sparks for a moment, but it dies quickly, because whatever his life has been like, he thinks it's pretty clear that Bills isn't exaggerating ( _"If you send a man to hell..._ ) about his own. He looks pale and too thin and ... empty. Alive with ferocity, yes, practically bristling with thrumming rage, but empty and dead. Corpse-like, and it's really terrible.

Lando's head is swimming, and there is blood running into his eye. He blinks rapidly to clear it, but doesn't otherwise move. He knife is like a magnet to his consciousness; his mind is full of its presence, but he resists the pull.

"I don't know what you're talking about, Bills," he says, and he's too tired to care how raw and hoarse his voice is, too hurt and too tired. What does it matter if Billy hears, anyhow? He isn't leaving here until Lando is dead, and if Billy is going to be the last person Lando ever sees (and somehow, even now, that doesn't seem so bad), then why hide? What's the point? It's clear that Lando is missing something, some vital piece of understanding that would make it clear why Billy is here wearing death's face. He even understands that whatever it is or was, Billy thinks Lando played some role in it. But the only thing he can actually talk about with any kind of knowledge is what he knows happened, what _he_ himself did. "There was nothing left for me to do but leave after what happened."

And he can hear the old hurt in his own voice. It's almost funny. He has become as good as Billy had once been at keeping his thoughts to himself. Julien La Fleur is admired and respected and feared at the tables, and Lando himself rarely surfaces these days. He spends most of his time as another man, and that man apparently has a better poker face than Lando does. Ha.

After all this time, Lando doesn't have what it takes to bluff Billy.

"You didn't want me," he says, and sways on his feet for a moment. His palm feels slick and uncertain around the footboard, but he hangs on grimly. "And you know we couldn't be partners anymore after a thing like that."

He looks at Billy (there is furious disbelief in Billy's eyes now, very plain, but it is still death and pain that Lando sees behind it, and he doesn't think it's so much emotion as it is some kind of twisted mask Billy has been building for himself during the last two years, something to hold onto during whatever hell he had been through, something to cling to, blame, the idea of retribution, and he feels sick to his soul that Billy had survived on hate, survived by hating _him_ ) and shakes his head and makes no effort at all to find his poker face.

"I don't know what else happened, Bills, but I had nothing to do with it."

This isn't the new Lando talking, the wire-faced one who speaks French and throws a knife left-handed and taunts Billy like he's been choosing his words for years. This is the Lando he pulled off the side of the rode, who sat by the fire with his eyes wide open and told Billy how his stepfather took a poker to him for his accent, the Lando who took months to learn to bluff and would never let Billy teach him how to lie. The Lando who couldn't.

But he has to be lying, he has to, lying to save his life, and however the last two years have seared Billy hollow, there's still some part of him that cannot bear the thought that this Lando, the one he'd half-convinced himself had never existed in the first place, could stand in front of him and lie about this. And it's the sudden flaring of that part to life, more than anything, that clamps his hand into a fist and sends it driving into Lando's gut, clenches his hands around Lando's shoulders when he reels and slams him against footboard before stumbling backward.

"Don't you _lie_ to me, goddammit!" he shouts hoarsely, feeling his body shake and spasm with rage. "Not about this, not after what you did, you fucking tell me the truth! _Urban_ did! Told it to me in that goddamn hellhole jail cell, how you came to him after a poker tournament and turned me in!" Bent over the footboard, Lando coughs spasmodically and shoves himself upright, with one hand reaching towards Billy and denial scrawled all over his face. Billy slaps his arm violently away. Three swift strides is all it take for him to cross the room, and then he's got the knife in his hand, tossing it to feel the weight.

"You fucked me, Orlando," he whispers, gaze locked on Lando's face. "I taught you and helped you and I did my fucking best to protect you, and you ran to Karl goddamn Urban when I wouldn't take you to my bed. You told him where to find me, and you fucked me in the end. I've waited two fucking years while you had yours, and now I'm going to make you bleed."

 _Karl Urban?_ He thinks maybe he misheard, but a tiny part of his brain assures him, no, that's what Bills said.

Lando has never met the man, though he met Marshall Weaving, once in Tulsa. He has never so much as seen Urban, but Lando knows who he is.

Sure he does. He's the Marshall that didn't keep the townsfolk of ... some goddamned town; Lando can't think of it ... it doesn't matter. Urban had let Billy's brother get lynched. Hadn't made a move to stop the good, upstanding citizens of the town from lynching Billy's brother, and Billy was -- understandably -- a bit bitter about that. Lando knows -- has always known -- that there is more to what happened between Bills and Urban than that, but he's never asked.

And he doesn't have time for this now anyhow. Whatever the connection is between Urban and this moment, he can't afford to worry about it now. He's still swimmy-headed from Billy's pistol and then his fists, and he's fairly sure he's got at least one broken rib, and now Bills has Lando's knife, the one he'd so blithely tossed into the table, and Lando doesn't think for an instant that Bills will be too squeamish to use it.

And whatever Lando might choose to say will make no real difference. Billy is determined. He will allow nothing in his mind except his own rage (maybe that's safer for Billy, easier, than it would be to admit he is wrong). But.

"I've never met Urban, Bills," he says anyway, because maybe it won't do any good, but ... He hates it that Bill thinks Lando betrayed him. Lando would never, Lando would die (will die, probably) first, and the pain of that hurts more presently, somehow, than his very real physical pain.

But even as he says it he feels the cool readiness of the fight descend, the ember of fear at the knife, the bloody knife, and Lando knows how sharp it is. For a moment he can see himself in his mind's eye, and he has thin lines of scars like those that line Billy's back, and the fear blossoms into outright terror because there is a stranger looking at him out of Billy's eyes, and that man will _cut_ him.

It's terror that fuels him, lets him ignore the grating pain in his side; the room has steadied as well, and he thinks distantly how remarkable it is that absolute terror can clear the mind.

He knows how to do this. He's trained his body to do it, and it does, flawlessly, a simple sidestep and twist and his fingers curl around a wrist that's attached to a hand holding a knife; his other fist slams his opponent's face, sending him off balance and wide eyed. Another easy step and Lando has the forearm and elbow attached to that wrist twisted beneath his arm, pinned against his throbbing ribs, and his elbow hooks back solidly into the body behind him, and warm breath washes across his back, a harshly forced exhalation, and it's easy, easy to disarm a homicidal stranger, easy to jab his fingertips into the tendons on the back of a strangers hand so that it spasms, the knife falls, the blade arcs, silver flashes, and then it's in Lando's hand, plucked out of the air mid-arc, and he's moving, putting distance between himself and Billy, and he will turn and he will throw and it will be as effortless as it always is, and he won't miss because he doesn't miss, he _never_ misses, and Bills will fall, Bills will die...

Bills will --

Bills.

Not a stranger, but William Boyd, Billy, _Bills_ , and once upon a time Lando would have died before he betrayed Bills. He would have died _gladly_ to save Bills.

And he can't kill Billy now. He won't. He _can't_.

And he knows even as he turns to face Bills that he will probably die, and the cool readiness is gone as quickly as it came, and he is just tired, just too tired to try anymore.

As Billy stumbles back under the blows, a jab of white-hot pain flashes up his arm, and the cold metal knife falls and doesn't hit the floor. _This is it, then_ , he thinks distantly as he lunges for the chair behind him and brings it arcing around. It'll be too late, of course, too late to stop Lando. He remembers how fast Lando was, and he can only have gotten faster since. There's rage, as the muscles in his shoulders lock and the chair picks up speed, rage that he came this far to fail. A bit of pain, as he whirls, but nothing compared to what he's weathered. And underneath all of it, a whispering thread of something still and patient that just might be relief. The chair'll be too late to save him, of course. It's two years too late. But he'll go down fighting, the most that anyone could ask, and he saw how sharp that blade was. It may even be quick.

He's still waiting for the swift strike of the knife when he feels the chair crash against Lando's side and shatter.

The knife never comes.

Lando staggers violently and falls to his knees, not one motion but a series of them, like a carpenter's frame collapsing in on itself. Blood blooms vividly from cuts to his face, chest, and shoulder, and one arm dangles at a slack, unnatural angle. Billy manages to halt his momentum and stares, the chair's broken back still clutched in his hands, as Lando sways forward and carefully, deliberately, lays the knife on the ground.

He'd known Billy had come here to kill him, and he never threw the knife.

Billy's head is swimming, boiling over, and his stomach churns as though he's going to be sick. After months of waking and sleeping and breathing with the notion that Lando wanted him dead, being faced with a Lando who didn't kill him when the chance presented itself makes him feel like he's cracking open, splitting apart at the seams. There's no logic, no sense to be found, no explanation Billy can find to keep himself afloat. And Lando's face is open and defenseless, with none of the steel that his bones had worn when Billy had first entered the room. Under the bruises and the bright, bright blood, his eyes are the same as they'd been when he'd turned at the sound of Billy's horse coming up the road from his stepfather's ranch. Lando's eyes are clear and unwavering, with the stripped-down acceptance of someone who can see the final bullet coming and is too tired to care anymore. The chair back drops from Billy's hand and hits the floor.

Lando thinks that the only time you can look at impending death without flinching is when it has become inevitability. He is going to die here today because he can't bring himself to hurt Bills. He is going to die here because Billy understands how to cut himself away from the past (or maybe Lando had never really meant anything to Billy at all, maybe Lando is just stupid, a stupid, stupid naïve boy with stupid, stupid childish notions) and Lando... Lando doesn't know how. And Lando doesn't want to know how, and all of that together adds up to death.

And that will almost be a relief because his arm hurts and his ribs hurt and his chest is aching and hollow and lined with something jagged and edged and cutting.

He is tired. He can't understand why the hell Billy is hurting him, and he is so tired.

Nevertheless, he makes the slow, difficult decision to stand -- which Bills does nothing to halt, else it would be a pointless attempt -- and the world sways treacherously around him, abruptly more dangerous and uncertain than he'd ever given it credit for (and he'd given it credit for quite a lot to begin with).

But Bills is still and quiet and making no move to finish him off, and it's important, _vital_ that Billy know, that he understand...

Lando would never... _could_ never...

He staggers forward a single step, aware that his left hand is doing that thing now, the uplifted palm, open and empty and subtly pleading, and there is an enormous expanse of black pain where his right arm should be. He pushes it away, ignores it, and manages one more staggering step before he falls forward. It seems slow.

An almost endless fall, and he has time to study the way the walls and floor tilt upward to meet him, to try and prepare himself for what will almost certainly be a tidal wave of crushing pain, but it never comes.

He fetches up against Billy's chest, and Billy is there (as he had always been, once), his presence a solid, comforting breaker, and Lando hears himself bark out a liquid sob as he presses his face into the warm skin of Billy's neck, his left hand hooking fingers into Billy's shirt and clenching desperately.

"Bills," he gasps, and blood fills his mouth and overflows, spattering Billy's shirt. He swallows once, twice, nearly gagging on the rich metallic tang of his own blood, but he is determined. "I didn't, I swear."

It's choked and garbled, but he thinks Billy understands; Billy's hands are on his waist abruptly, supporting him, _almost_ holding him, and Lando wants to melt into Bills, just relax against him and close his eyes and let himself fall softly into silence, but he can't do that.

He can't take from Billy the thing that Billy had refused Lando once, so he keeps as much of his own weight as he can, and only allows himself the small treasure of his brow against Billy's throat.

"Never do..." he croaks, and it dissolves into a helpless, gurgling cough that brings up more blood, too much blood, and he and Billy are both nearly covered in it when it tapers off. "Never hurt... Bills," he whispers hoarsely, "love you, couldn't, wouldn't..."

They're pebbles, the words stumbling from Lando's mouth. They skid and trip against his chest, and their halting rhythm sets more pebbles moving behind his ribs, in his head. Each small stone knocks loose another, and another, and those knock more pieces free, and the sound of all these broken pieces of Billy starts slowly, subtly, to build.

Lando is shaking under Billy's hands, breath damp and ragged; his blood is wet and sears like a kiss as it flows over Billy's skin. But inside, the dust is rising.

He didn't throw the knife. He didn't throw it the first time, when Billy came in and Lando could see who he was, and he didn't take the gun, when Billy (blindly, recklessly) charged him, and he didn't throw it again when he knew why Billy had come and what he meant to do to him. Three times and Billy's still standing. And if he hated Billy, he would've killed him, and he wouldn't be clinging to him now as if he were a tree in a stampede.

The rumble climbs like distant thunder nearing, and the pieces breaking free slide down his mind's slope in sheets.

And if Lando doesn't hate Billy now, maybe he didn't hate Billy then. Maybe he never went to Urban, maybe he never did anything but leave. Maybe Billy's been wrong about that all along. And if Billy was wrong about this, maybe he was also wrong that night. Maybe Lando wasn't just drunk, and he did know what he was doing.

The pieces start to hit, each one small but the impacts unceasing, and he can't shield himself from them. The rumble shifts into a hammering roar.

Because if Lando didn't kill him, and he never went to Urban, and he knew what he was doing, and he never hated Billy, then …

 _Never hurt … Bills, love you, couldn't, wouldn't_

Then maybe Billy's been wrong about everything. And everything that's happened has been his fault.

And with that, all the pieces break free, and the rest of Billy's mind starts to fall.

Landslide.

He screams helplessly under the pressure, blinded by the dust and wracked with pain. Huge pieces pound him, knocking him violently, and he tries desperately to deflect them, beating with arms and fists and feet, trying to save himself as his world comes tearing apart in a maelstrom. There's no room for thought, his senses overwhelmed, and all he can do is batter against the onslaught, clawing and kicking and beating his way to survival.

It takes centuries before the last piece falls, and silence descends.

His arms and hands are wrenched, aching. One ankle feels sprained. His jeans are torn and drenched with blood. And his shirt. And his bruised and lacerated hands. But there's no rubble beneath his feet—just rough pine boards, with blood pooling across them and sinking through the cracks.

Not his blood.

There's a woman's sob, breathless and terrified, and Billy's vision clears enough to see

Lando. On the floor in front of him.

A beaten, bloody wreck.

As Billy stares at what he's done, his hands start shaking. The tremors spread, and bones and muscle and sinew come undone, and then he's bursting out the door and down the narrow hallway, and the woman in the room is screaming, and the world blurs, and the darkness takes him.


End file.
